In most ways I am a rather strange person. Why do you think I do this job. Moreover, I liked school, especially college and graduate school. Why college and graduate school? It was at this point that the point of education changed from the acquisition of information to discovery and understanding. Let me give you an example from my study of cognition. Early in my learning of psychology, I was taught as were you that we have a short term memory that is of limited capacity. It could only hold 7±2 chunks of information for less than 30 seconds. This was a piece of information, uncritically swallowed. While other ideas were presented in college, they did not become understanding until graduate school. There a light came on. While at one time we have a limit to what we actively remember, this does not mean there is a separate type of memory. Perhaps, according to one other idea, what we think is short term memory is really just how much of long term memory that we can remember at one time. Not two memories but two different activities of one memory. Now, I am unclear as to what short term memory really is. While this sounds like I have regressed, it is actually progression, I have a deeper understanding about cognition and realize the tentative nature of our theories. Now I know that I can add my understanding to the mix that we call science and perhaps move us closer to Truth, which I do believe exists.
Now in this assignment, I want to have you engage in some of the same types of tasks that I find most fun. It is in doing theory making where we are most closely engaged in trying to figure out what is going on in our heads. You have some experience with the facts of psychology, the data, and can even critique them. You also are familiar with others explanations of what these data are thought to mean: others theories. However, to really make psychology your own, you need to be able to look at the data for yourselves and make your own theory. No, that does not mean your theory is not related to others or has to start from ground zero, it just means that you are not bound by other theories, realizing their provisional character.
Remember, all of our theories are tentative. Also, often many of the most brilliant new ideas come from young members of a discipline who are not chained down by a lifetime of thinking in certain patterns. Skinner, Piaget, Freud were all young when the did their best and most original work. Physics has as a myth the expectation that if you do not discover anything interesting by 30 you will not make a major discovery. So in some ways you are at an advantage over me when it comes to developing a novel insight.
For your midterm and final papers, you are to develop a theory or model for some aspect of our cognition. This page describes what is expected in this assignment. First, I will give a brief description of what is a theory and what is a model.
A theory is a coherent explanation and description of a phenomenon, in this case our cognition. It taking the raw information, the data, and assigning meaning to them. Yes, I mean that data by themselves lack meaning. Meaning and interpretation comes from outside, from us, as we seek to understand the reality behind the data. No, a theory is not purely a cultural phenomena. The data are anchors to reality but not definers of reality. Any good theory must explain data and not from just one study but as many as possible.
To develop a theory of cognition, you need first to define the basic principles by which you think our cognition operates. While it is best if every aspect of your theory is derived directly from data, it is here that you are most likely to make some assumptions, often called working assumptions. Research does not tell us everything we need to know so we need to make some educated guesses here.
Some of the other issues for your theory you will need to determine are the mechanisms or structures of cognition: how does cognition happen and in what place does it happen. I am not looking for you to at this time to determine any biological mechanisms or think of brain structures (though if you can it will be extra credit to you, if soundly done).
Your theory needs to be internally consistent and to make clearly testable hypotheses.
Very Important: You do not need to start from scratch and assume that everybody else is wrong. The psychologist we will come across are very bright people and have a lot of good ideas. Draw on them. So if you like the idea of separate stages of memory use that in your theory. However, I doubt that you will find that any theory in the book is comprehensive enough for what I am hoping for from you.
Nor does your theory need not be correct (in fact, we will not know if your theory is correct unless we get the chance to test it) but it should be soundly based upon cited research. Even more importantly, it should be able to be tested, that is shown to be wrong. I am not requiring that the theory be mathematical or quantitative in nature, however, like with the biology, if you can make it mathematical or quantitative, it will be counted as extra credit.
Ok, I have mentioned that theories, especially at this point in psychology are tentative in nature. I also said a good theory does not have to be correct. You should be asking yourself, so what is the point of a theory, in general, and why are we doing this paper, in particular? Good question. Without a theory we have nothing that has meaning. We need a theory to have understanding. Also, we constantly theorize. When you make a decision about when or if to marry, when or if to have kids, what to do with the kids if you have them, etc., you are making your decisions based upon a theory. You will use a theory, an informal one, to determine what type of job to get and how to work at that job. All aspects where you attach value or meaning or understanding you are operating under a theory. So practice in developing and understanding how a theory works will be very helpful throughout life.
Midterm.
Pick one of the topics from the first half of the term. Develop a theory about this topic (the more comprehensive the theory the better). You will need to describe your theory in clear detail, cite research and finding that support your contention, argue how it is better than the theories in the book (this may be that it is more comprehensive or precise), and indicate some of its novel and important predictions. The assignment will be weighted as follows:
15% Organization
15% Clarity
25% Support for Theory
15% Internal Consistency
10% Predictions
10% Creativity
10% Misc.
Final.
Think of my feedback and any related topics from the second half of the term as tests of the data. This paper constitutes a substantial revision of the first paper taking into account these two sources of information and anything else you might have learned from outside review of cognitive research. First review your earlier theory and then describe how and why it is changed or extended. Complete revision is ok or just a few changes. It depends on how the information can be integrated. You may also adjust the theory based upon the comments from the first paper. The weighting for this paper is as follows:
15% Organization
15% Clarity
15% Reasonableness of the changes
20% Support for Theory
15% Internal Consistency
05% New Predictions
10% Creativity
05% Misc.