Psych 366: Term Project

Psych 366 - Music Cognition: Term Project Syllabus Schedule Moodle
In this class, we will read a lot about other people's scientific work. For your term project, I would like to give you the opportunity to explore a question of your choosing. As you can see from the course schedule, we will work on this project bit-by-bit as the semester unfolds. First, we will select a question. Then, we will do some background research related to that question. The next steps will depend on whether we choose to pursue empirical projects or literature reviews. If we select the literature review option, everyone will work independently. If we select the empirical project option, then we will work in teams to develop a small experiment to address your research question. We will vote on the approach. Either way, you will present your experiment/literature review to the rest of the class during the last two weeks of the semester. You will also write an APA-style report of your final project. It seems like a big undertaking, and it is, but we will walk through step-by-step, week-by-week throughout the semester. We will also probably have occasion to meet outside of class to make sure your project remains on track.
Assignment	Description	Length	Due Date
Topic Selection	As I mentioned at the beginning of the semester, the scientific approach to studying music leaves many people cold. The stimuli are not always musical; the listening context is often different than what we typically experience. In short, the way researchers engage with music may be very different from the way you engage with music. The term project will give you an opportunity to study music however you think it ought to be studied. The first step will be to identify a topic that interests you. One way to do this would be to draw upon your experiences with music. Below are some potential topics, but, of course, the point is for you to study whatever aspect of music you find interesting: How does music affect us emotionally? Does music influence athletic/intellectual performance? How does music affect processing of other stimuli (e.g., movies, television, commercial settings, advertising)? Does music preference tell us anything about the personality of the listener? What factors affect the popularity of a tune? What are some songs hits? Does music influence personal/political views? How do we identify familiar melodies? Can music be used in to alleviate symptoms associated depression, anxiety, dementia. and so forth? Where did music come from? How is it related to language? Is musical ability unique or is it related to other cognitive abilities? This assignment should be short. You should identify a topic, explain the rationale for your choice, and float at least one experimental hypothesis. That hypothesis should speculate as to some effect or influence or relationship that music has within the topic domain you have selected. Here are some examples: ‘I think the music young people listen to today is corrupting their moral judgment.’ ‘I think advertising music affects attitudes at an unconscious level.’ ‘Music is a primitive form of communication that is closely related to language.’	Short paragraph	Feb 16^th
Background Literature	Personal observations are valuable, but they are only the first step in a scientific investigation. You need data, of course, but you also need to consider the perspectives of people who have been thinking about your question for a long time. The fact that others have been thinking about a question for a long time does not mean that their views are ‘right’. It does not mean that their insights have more value than your own. It does mean that you need to consider their ideas carefully: retain what is valuable and critique what is not. For this assignment, I need you to locate 3-5 articles relevant to your topic. Summarize each article in a few sentences: What was the main research question? How did the researchers design an experiment to address that question? What conclusions did the researchers draw? In addition, you will need to produce one paragraph that synthesizes the literature you located. How do the articles fit together? What questions do they raise? How have they influenced your thinking about your topic moving forward; that is, do the literature point you towards a specific hypothesis?	3-5 paper summaries + 1 paragraph	Mar 1^st
Research Statement	The next step in the process is to formulate a question that you will organize the project around. For example, if you are interested in how music functions in an advertising setting, your research statement might be something like: ‘Background music is an effective advertising tool for X type of product, but not Y type of product’. Or, ‘Music is effective when used in this kind of advertising context, but not this other context.’ Whether phrased as a question or a statement, you need to create some ‘tension’ in this part of the assignment. The view/hypothesis that you are presenting has to be balanced by some (plausible) alternate view. Your job in this assignment is to present both your view and the alternative and to explain the rationale for both. The alternate view has to make sense at some level; there has to be two sides that you are choosing between. The rationale can (should?) include references to specific papers, perhaps the ones that you identified for the *Background Literature* assignment.	1-2 paragraphs	March 15^th
Resolution	The penultimate step in the process will be to expand the *Research Statement* into a full-blown outline. Rather than merely presenting the alternatives/describing the tension in the literature, you will present an outline of the literature supporting the alternate views, providing more detail about the supporting literature on both sides. This part of the assignment will require you to provide more detail about the arguments you alluded to in the *Research Statement* assignment. In addition, you will have to propose some kind of resolution to solve the tension. For example you could argue that: one view is more compelling than the other on the basis of available or forthcoming evidence (see below). the two views are complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. the two views are both valid but apply to different subpopulations, contexts, and so forth. Finally, you will have to provide the overview of an experimental methodology that could provide data to support your resolution of the tension. Some of you will opt to conduct this experiment, others will not. But, I want every project to include an idea for an experiment that will address the main research question.	3-4 paragraphs	April12^th
	Final Assignments Two of the primary skills that this course is meant to foster are talking about (in class) and writing about (thought papers) experimental research. The final assignments for the semester will give you a chance to exercise both of these skills.
Oral Presentation	Your presentatin will give you an opportunity to discuss what you have learned with the class. Your presentation should describe the basic question(s) that motivated your research, the different approaches that have been used to address that question and your synthesis of research in the field. If you have conducted an experiment, you would describe the methods, data and conclusions from that project, as well. The in-class presesntation will give you an opportunity to present your thinking to the class, along with the opportunity to receive feedback (e.g., what aspects of your argument were difficult to follow or needed to be tweaked in other ways).	10 minutes (practice!!!)	April 29^th May 1^st or May 6^th
Final Paper	You will use what you learn from the oral presentations to create a written version of your project. The written version will follow APA style; here are some hepful tips on APA style, but I'll help you with any questions that you have. I view this assignment as a literature review that culminates in an experiment proposal. As such, it does not make much sense to write a paper with an Abstract, and Method, Results, and Discussion sections. You should have a title page and one 'section', essentially an introduction, that lays out the work that you have done all semester: the question that motivated your paper the relevant background literature the tension or conflict or unanswered question that is the focus of your literature review and proposed experiment the proposed experiment and finally, your take-home message: What would we learn from your experiment? How would it contribute to the literature and/or our understanding of music cognition? To repeat, because no data were collected, I think it makes more sense to present your experiment descriptively in the text rather than with a more formally structured Method section. But, you are free to handle this however you please. You can create a subsection for the proposed experiment, or you can lay out a formal Method section if you choose to do so. The final product should be in the neighborhood of 8-10 pages.	8-10 pages	May 16^th