psych paper

Spring 2021 PSYC 100A Katia Dilkina

ASSIGNMENT 1 (5%) – due Sunday Feb 7

FORMAT: PDF submission on Brightspace. APA format, 300-500 words, 1-2 pages.

CONTENT: This assignment should include the following components:

 Your research question (could be identical to what you submitted in assignment 0, a revised version of that, or a novel question altogether)

 APA-style citations of three primary-source scientific papers, along with a statement of how each one relates to your research question

How do I find primary-source journal articles?

 Use UVic libraries online search engine: https://www.uvic.ca/library/  Enter the key words of your research question (e.g. inattentional blindness, perception, memory)  Refine your search by choosing “scholarly and peer-review”  Once you are looking at only peer-reviewed scholarly articles, the last thing to look for to ensure it

is a primary source is whether the paper reports original research (i.e. studies conducted by the authors), NOT findings from other studies (i.e. not a review or a meta-analysis).

Grading rubric

We will use a 3-point scale to assess your work on the following criteria:

% of grade Research question (1%)

Relevant to course .5% Well-specified .5%

Journal article #1 (1%) Primary source .25% Relevant to research question .25% Explanation of relevance .5%

Journal article #2 (1%) Primary source .25% Relevant to research question .25% Explanation of relevance .5%

Journal article #3 (1%) Primary source .25% Relevant to research question .25% Explanation of relevance .5%

Mechanics (1%) APA citations .5% Grammar / writing style / clarity .5%

Example:

Spring 2021 PSYC 100A Katia Dilkina

Do the languages we speak affect how we conceptualize the world around us?

This paper will examine linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that characteristics of the languages

we speak – such as grammatical structures or lexicalization – shape our conceptual knowledge or

representations, and therefore affect the way we perceive and think about objects, people, ideas, and

situations.

Journal Article #1

Boroditsky et al. (2003) present a series of experiments with English-Spanish and English-

German bilinguals, in which they tested whether grammatical gender plays a role in categorization.

Grammatical gender is language specific in that the sets of nouns marked as feminine, masculine, or

neutral vary between languages which mark gender on their nouns. It is therefore relevant to the

question whether aspects of the language we speak affect cognition. Similarly, the tasks used in this

research included collecting concept descriptions and concept similarity ratings both of which are

considered to test semantic categories. How we represent and organize concepts into categories is

essential for how we perceive and think about them.

Journal Article #2

Yang & Sun (2016) looked at the spatiotemporal representations of English and Mandarin

speakers. In English, written text is processed horizontally, left-to-right, whereas in Mandarin it is

processed vertically, top-to-bottom. In addition, English speakers use horizontal spatiotemporal

metaphors (with the past behind and the future ahead), while Mandarin speakers use vertical

spatiotemporal metaphors (with the past on top /above and the future on the bottom / below). Both of

these define a linguistic difference between groups and are therefore relevant to the question of

linguistic relativity. Moreover, the researchers investigated people’s preference and processing time for

temporal sequences in either vertical or horizontal dimension, placing this study within the domain of

cognition as spatiotemporal representations are part of how we conceptualize the world around us.

Journal Article #3 …