Cognitive Psychology Position Paper Guidelines

For this paper, you must take a position on a topic in cognitive psychology and defend it. Your position paper can be on any topic related to perception, attention, language, memory, problem solving or reasoning.

You must select a minimum of three empirical journal articles for your paper (i.e., review articles are not acceptable – the article must describe the collection of new data, not a review of existing studies). Note that the articles you use must be original sources; secondary citations and citations from textbooks are inadequate for this purpose.

The strengths and weaknesses of the articles should be assessed when developing your position and be integrated into the body of the paper along with suggestions for future research. There are many approaches to this assignment.

Your paper may take a neuroscientific or evolutionary perspective or discuss an issue in terms of cultural or individual differences. You could apply findings from the cognitive psychology literature to a problem in a field such as education, law, economics, etc.. You could discuss “hidden” processing like unconscious processing, the role of affect, etc..

The position paper can take on different forms:

o    discuss different sides of an issue and then argue which position you take and why,

o    present a critical analysis of a theory or experimental set of data. Detailing the shortcomings and presenting your position on how to improve the theory or experiment

o    write a research proposal that includes a literature review, a novel experimental idea, and the relevance of your experiment, and an interpretation of potential results.