Due. Put your paper in Professor Coulson's mailbox in the Cognitive Science Building by 10am on Monday June 9, 2008.  

Topic. Find an interesting example of reasoning involving one or more of the following phenomena:  analogy, metaphor, blending, induction, deduction, implicature, categorization, or decision making.  Potential sources for topics include: a conversation you've recently overheard, behavior you've recently observed in friends or acquaintances, an advertisement, a passage from a song or poem, an event in a movie, an article in a magazine or newspaper, comic strips, scientific articles, textbooks, webpages, or even user interfaces.  Write a 5-page paper in which you analyze (in some detail) the reasoning in this example, and relate it to material covered in this course.  Consider how relevant theoretical approaches covered in 101C would explain various features of your example.  You may also want to discuss whether or not your example is consistent with  relevant experimental evidence. In your conclusion, briefly consider the implications of your example for one or more theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of interest.

Grading.  Papers will be judged on the following criteria:

• Has an example of analogy, metaphor, blending, induction, deduction, implicature, categorization, or decision making been provided?
• Is the example described in a clear and concise manner?
• Has the relationship between the example and the cognitive phenomenon of interest been made clear?
• Does the paper consider various factors -- e.g. the form of reasoning, the language used, contextual knowledge, background knowledge, other relevant factors -- that someone might need to understand the example (viz. if it is an implicature, a cartoon, a newspaper article, etc.), or to behave as observed (if it is an inductive, deductive, or analogical inference, a categorization, or a decision)?
• Does the paper connect at some point with material covered in Cognitive Science 101C?
• Does the paper touch on the implications of the example for theories and models of the cognitive phenomenon of interest?

Form. The paper should be typed, employing a readable font.  Be sure to proofread for mistakes of spelling and grammar.  If you are a non-native English speaker, get a native English speaker to help you proofread.  Spelling and grammar do count! 5 pages is just a guideline.  Your paper may be as short as 3 pages or as long as 10 pages.  Although brevity is a virtue, it's important that your paper actually say something interesting.

Hints

• In referring to your example (advertisement, cartoon, movie, user interface, etc.), be sure to include a description or summary -- even if you include the example itself in an appendix.  Your description should not, however, dominate the paper.  It might be used in the introduction to catch attention, and should be included in the analysis itself.
• Try to integrate the ideas you read in the course materials with your own by restating them, explaining them, analyzing them, and/or questioning them.  Do your best to demonstrate that you wrote your paper this quarter (viz. you're not recycling a paper you wrote for another course, you didn't buy it from some unscrupulous nerd, etc.).

Common problems with papers include:

• No connection with concurrent course material.  Papers should refer to facts, ideas, etc. discussed in Cognitive Science 101C.  (But you are not limited to those concepts!) The connection to course material need not be extensive, but it must be there.
• Misunderstanding or misstating an effect or theory. Whenever you're making a connection with something discussed in class, make sure you correctly understand and clearly state that something! When describing an experimental result, it is usually desirable to describe what was done, what was measured, and what the experimenters found.
• Saying too much or too little about a theory or an experiment. Try to follow Grice's maxim of quantity and say just enough to clearly express the relevance of experimental evidence or various theoretical orientations.
• Analysis of the cognitive phenomenon (especially true for metaphor analyses) is too shallow.

• In using ideas from course readings, be sure to use paraphrases, summaries, and (when appropriate) quotations.  Note that quotations are only used when the exact words that the author used are relevant.  That is, the statement is either so outrageous that it must be read as stated, or it is so eloquent that it can't be paraphrased.  Statements that are common knowledge need not be cited.
• When you are restating information that comes from your textbook, or an 'outside' source, be sure to follow that statement with a citation.  For citation format, use the parenthesized name/date format popular in psychology: (Kosslyn, 1986).
• Include a reference list with full bibliographical information at the end of your paper.