Post on 19-Dec-2015
Your Research Proposal Project
• A research proposal attempts to persuade the reader that:– The underlying question is highly important– The proposed methodology and experimental design is the
best available approach– That you have the knowledge and talent to do the proposed
research– That you have a research program worth funding
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Your Research Proposal Project
• A research proposal is therefore similar to many other situations in which you will try to persuade someone of something– The skill is portable
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Your Research Proposal Project
• As in other situations, your reader should be assumed to be unconvinced and thus unwilling to spend much time and energy entertaining your argument!
• You must make your argument easy and fast
• The key to that is organizationL
Research Proposals Should be “Theory Driven”
• Most proposals are organized around a specific theory
• What is the difference between a theory and a question?
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The Parts of a Research Proposal
• Background• Statement of the theory• Prediction(s) that follow from the theory• Experimental Method and Design• Timeline• Budget• References
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The Parts of a Research Proposal
• Background• Statement of the theory• Prediction(s) that follow from the theory• Experimental Method and Design• Timeline• Budget• References
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These aren’t necessary for your project
Assignment• Rules:– Must be human Cognitive Neuroscience
– Experimental approach may involve animal research only if this is the best way to test your theory• Studying humans is preferable to studying animals
when you have a specific theory about human cognition
• One moves to animal research because it tells you something that human research cannot
• If this applies to your theory, you will make this constraint explicit in your proposal
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Cognitive Operations• What does the brain actually do?
• Some possible answers:– “The mind”– Information processing…– Transforms of mental representations– Execution of mental representations of actions
First Principles• “cognitive operations are processes that generate, elaborate upon, or
manipulate representations”
– As patterns of activity in one or more neurons– We often lack conscious access to these representations– Neuroscientists still know very little about how information is represented in
the brain
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can start with sensory input and progress to more abstract forms
– Local features such as colors, line orientation, brightness, motion are represented at low levels
How might a neuron “represent” the presence of this line?
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can start with sensory input and progress to more abstract forms
– Local features such as colors, line orientation, brightness, motion are represented at low levels
A “labeled line”-Activity on this unit “means” that a line is present-Does the line actually have to be present?
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can start with sensory input and progress to more abstract forms
– texture defined boundaries are representations arrived at by synthesizing the local texture features
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can be “embellished”
- Kaniza Triangle is represented in a way that is quite different from the actual stimulus
-the representation is embellished and extended
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Rubin Vase, Necker Cube are examples of mental representations that are dynamic
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an example of transforming a mental representation in a continuous process
Mentally rotate the images to determine whether they are identical or mirror-reversed
SAME MIRROR-REVERSED
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an example of transforming a mental representation in a continuous process
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an example of transforming a mental representation in a continuous process
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an example of transforming a mental representation in a continuous process
– The time it takes to respond is linearly determined by the number of degrees one has to rotate
– Somehow the brain must perform a set of operations on these representations - where? how?
Mental Representations• Mental Representations can be
transformed into abstract information representations
– Posner letter matching task
– Are these letters from the same category (vowels or consonants) or are they different?
Mental Representations• Mental Representations can be
transformed into abstract information representations
– Posner letter matching task
– Are these letters from the same category (vowels or consonants) or are they different?
– Are they physically the same or are they the same in an abstract way - they are in the same category?
A A
A a
A U
S C
A S
SAME
DIFFERENT
Mental Representations• Mental Representations can be
transformed into abstract information representations
– Posner letter matching task
– Participants are fastest when the response doesn’t require transforming the representation from a direct manifestation of the stimulus into something more abstract
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
RED
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
BLUE
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
GREEN
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
RED
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
BLUE
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
GREEN
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour
– The mental representation of the colour and the representation of the text are incongruent and interfere
– one representation must be selected and the other suppressed
– This is one conceptualization of attention
Mental Representations
• Representations in neural a neural code aren’t limited to sensory information
• Other examples:
– Place cells in hippocampus represent location of an animal in a local coordinate system
Mental Representations
• These are some examples of how a cognitive psychologist might investigate mental representations
• The cognitive neuroscientists asks:
– where are these representations formed?
– What is the neural mechanism? What is the code for a representation?
– What is the neural process by which representations are transformed?