How to write your term paper (“essay”) on “Episodic cognition”
UOS, Institute of Cognitive Science, WS 2018/19, Annette Hohenberger, January 2019
Choice of topic and literature
Choose a topic of your interest related to “Episodic cognition”. It can be the one you also presented in class, another topic that we discussed in class, or a novel – but thematically related – one. Your term paper should be based on a reasonable amount of literature, e.g. some 3-4 papers, book chapters, etc. The literature you present in that essay will necessarily be incomplete. However, try to identify some representative core texts from which you can further explore your topic in some more detail in more specialized articles. You may either choose your papers such that they form a coherent set of papers related to the same topic and provide an overview (“review essay”) or, alternatively, choose papers from different (theoretical or methodological) accounts of the topic and evaluate their merits and demerits critically (“critical essay”).
I will outline below how your term paper should be structured and what you should write in each section.
Structure of your essay
Title
On the front page, please state the title of your essay. The title should capture the main idea of your paper. It can be short, e.g., “Episodic-like cognition in animals”, extended: “Episodic cognition – similarities and differences between episodic memory and episodic future thinking”, or in the form of a question, e.g.; “Do animals have episodic foresight?”
Below the title, provide your name, your e-mail, your institute, course title, instructor’s name, and date of submission.
Abstract
On the following page, write a short abstract (no more than 200 words) that summarizes the main issues that you present in the introduction, the main body of your paper, and the conclusion section. Note that no novel material should appear in the abstract but only known material from your paper.
Keywords
Below the abstract, provide up to five keywords that are relevant for your term paper, e.g., episodic memory, episodic future thinking, foresight, prospection, recursion, chronesthesia, autonoetic consciousness, phenomenology, mental time travel, autobiographic memory, semantic memory, cognitive development, what-where-when, episodic-like memory, animal cognition, episodic counterfactuals, etc.
Paper
Your paper will comprise several sections, as pointed out below. You may (but do not have to) use numbered head-lines along with the titles. If appropriate, you may give further (numbered) sub-headlines for each section (but not for very short sections).
Introduction
In the introduction, provide a sufficient background of your topic, e.g., “The development of episodic memory in young children”, “Episodic-like memory in animals”, or “The difference between episodic, autobiographic, and semantic memory”. Embed it in (some of) the general literature from the introductory sessions in our course. A good way to do this is to briefly refer to the memory taxonomy (remember the diagram with the memory systems: procedural/declarative; episodic/semantic). Explain what “episodic cognition” means (because it is still not a very often used term). If necessary, distinguish between episodic, autobiographic, and semantic memory. If necessary, explain the terminology (e.g., that episodic future thinking, episodic foresight, and prospection mean the same thing). The introduction to your topic can be historic (very probably because everyone refers to Endel Tulving when mentioning “episodic memory” and “autonoesis”) or just thematic. Point out why your topic is an important one for cognitive science and what we can learn from it about human cognition.
At the end of the introduction, give a short preview of the structure of the remainder of your paper, e.g.: “In section 2, I will give present and discuss various studies on “insert your topic here”. In section 3, I will … until your last section (usually “Conclusion and outlook”). The number of sections depends on how you structure the main body of your paper.
Main body of your paper
After the introduction the main body of your paper follows. It can include as many sections as you find necessary. Label each section (and any sub-sections, if necessary). (However, don’t label it “Main body” – this is just the label with which I refer to that part of your paper in this guideline ;-). In the main body of your paper you should present the literature that you have read on your particular topic and discuss it critically.
Overall, compose this section such that the reader gets a good overview of the research in the field, in terms of theoretical approaches, major research questions, methodologies used, arguments and empirical evidence. Think of the reader as an “intelligent but uninformed” person. If there is some controversy in the field (think of the classical controversy between generative linguists (Chomsky-style) who tend to think in terms of hierarchical tree structures and learning theorists/connectionists who tend to think in terms of linear strings), discuss it critically.
In this part you may also want to provide figures, tables, or any other graphical material (hierarchies are naturally very amenable to this). For some tips how to do this, see below.
Conclusion and outlook
In this part of your paper, you may briefly summarize the theoretical accounts, methods used, and main findings of the studies you presented and discussed before and derive some main conclusions from them. Finally, you may provide some outlook in what direction(s) the future research in this area might proceed.
Bibliography
All (and only the) literature mentioned in the term paper needs to be referenced. A common format is the APA style (6th edition), see http://www.apastyle.org/. But other styles exist as well, see https://pitt.libguides.com/citationhelp. As long as you do it consistently, I don’t mind which one you choose. Our library has the on-line version of “The concise APA handbook” (Miller et al., 2017, see references below). You can familiarize yourself with the APA style via this book and/or via the webpage.
If you quote from an internet source, provide the URL in a special section of your bibliography. Please note that you should add information about when you accessed this website (because websites may change or be deleted in the future). E.g., you may write “Website accessed dd/mm/yyyy”.
Figures and tables
If you want to add some graphical material, please number figures and tables (separately) in serial order and provide a sub-title and caption (explanation of the content of the figure, abbreviations used in the figure or table, etc.). For any graphical material you need to give the exact source (author(s), year, page!). A graphical element should be referred to in the text and the reader should be clear about what it is supposed to show. Do not expect the reader to know or guess what you want him/her to understand from the graph. He/she can only infer as much from it as you explain in the text.
Size and format
Your term paper should be of reasonable length (ca. 7-10 pages, ca. 3500- 4500 words, excluding cover page and appendix (optional)). Please do not write more (you are many but I am just one). You may choose “single” or 1.15 line-spacing (as in this document), the choice of fonts and font size is up to you (usually 11 or 12 pt). The paper should have 2 cm margins at the top, bottom and both sides. The alignment (left aligned, justified) is up to you.
Language
Please take your time and review your essay in the very end for any language problem (grammatical construction, lexical choice, spelling, punctuation, format, etc.). It’s worth the time! Most of us are non-native speakers of English. So I don’t expect your English to be perfect; on the contrary, I will become suspicious if it is too good (to be true). I don’t grade your English. However, your paper should be readable to the extent that I can understand its content. (If I find it necessary, I will suggest corrections (to the best of my (imperfect) knowledge) in some part of your paper. This is just an informal correction, though.)
