Your assignment is to write a review of the literature on a particular topic in Cognitive Psychology. Your review should be a maximum of 12 double-spaced pages (including title page and references). Fonts should be set at 12-point, with 1-inch margins. Imagine you are a Cognitive Psychologist and having read many research papers on a specific topic (e.g., procedural learning in amnesia), you decided to write a review paper that synthesizes the current state of the literature. You can think of this as a good Wikipedia entry of a topic in cognitive psychology — the key difference is that your review paper will be more detailed, will cite scientific sources as references and will be written in APA style You may choose any topic we have, or will, cover in class or lab, or any other topic in Cognitive Psychology for that matter. A quick perusal of the textbook will provide a number of potential topics to choose from. Another great source is Current Directions in Psychological Science, which Falvey Library carries. The best strategy is to pick something that interests you! You should be careful, however, not to choose a topic that is too broad (e.g., “attention” or “memory”), focusing instead on more manageable topics (e.g., spatial attention, mood congruent memory, mental imagery, etc.). If you define your topic too general there will simply be too much relevant research, making it very difficult to decide which are the most relevant papers. Most importantly, you need to be sure that the topic you choose addresses a theoretical issue in Cognitive Psychology. Be careful not to choose a topic that strays into Clinical, Developmental, or Abnormal Psychology. • Title page • Introduction ending with thesis statement (1 paragraph/page) • Body of review that follows organization laid out in thesis statement (6 -8 pages) • Brief summary of your thesis and the evidence supporting that thesis (1 paragraph/page) • Reference List (1 page)
