Final Paper Instructions
Each student must write a final paper (maximum length: 1000 words; please double-space your paper and use a 12-point font) on a topic of their choosing (subject to approval by the instructor). The instructor will ask 7-9 students to volunteer to give a brief (e.g., 5-10 minute) presentation based on their paper toward the end of the semester.
Paper topics should be areas of cognitive science related to those discussed in class, probabilistic models related to those discussed in class, or, ideally, both. Some example topics are:
. A theory from the scientific literature regarding aspects of human cognition such as perception, memory, attention, reasoning, or decision making;
. A probabilistic model (or perhaps 2-3 related models) from the scientific literature
regarding aspects of human cognition such as perception, memory, attention, reasoning, or decision making;
. A probabilistic model (or perhaps 2-3 related models) from the scientific literature from some other discipline. For example, a probabilistic model of:
consumer behavior from the business/economics literature;
voter behavior from the political science literature;
medical diagnosis from the medical literature;
creativity (e.g., music creation, poetry creation, etc.);
. An algorithmic advance (e.g., a new way of performing approximate posterior inference) from the statistics or machine learning literatures.
Papers should address questions such as the following:
. What is the primary research question or issue being addressed?
. What did the researchers do to address this research question or issue? Please avoid
overly technical descriptions. An intuitive or conceptual description is sufficient for the purposes of this final paper.
. What are the researchers’ main conclusions?
. What are the strengths ofthe reported research?
. What are the weaknesses of the reported research?
. Does the research lead to new scientific predictions or new directions for future research?