Lab 2: Lexical Decisions

PSYCHMate

Making a Title page (New page, 5)

 Use the same font and font size for all pages of the manuscript. This includes page numbers.
Make one inch margin (left, right, top and bottom) on all manuscript pages.
Page number (right-hand top corner, ˝ inch below the paper’s edge)
Running head (left flushed, the running head should be written in capitals, 50 letters or less).
Title (make a meaningful and a creative title)
Author and affiliation (Your name and Institution)

Writing the Abstract (New page, 10)

After the title page, on a new page write the abstract. Abstract is a synopsis of the research paper. It outlines a summary of all the major sections in the manuscript report, like the introduction, methods, results, and the discussion. For lab 1, you only have methods and results sections, so write your abstract comprising of these sections only. Word count for an abstract is between 150-250 words. The abstract is left flushed and not tabbed. Write all numbers as Arabic numerals, except those numbers that begin a sentence (see section 2.04 of the APA manual for details).

Writing the Method section (New page, 30)

The title word “Method” centered on the page with uppercase lowercase letters and is bold. The subheads, Participants, Materials, Design and Procedure, are flush left and bold too.

The point of the method section is to tell your reader what you did and how you did it. You should have enough information so that your reader can 1) evaluate your design and procedure and 2) replicate your experiment. Do not include any other information in this section. For example, you should not explain why you chose the design you did here. That goes in the introduction.

Here are the subsections of the method section. Provide details of what you should include in each of these subsections by addressing the questions below.

Participants (5)
 Who were your participants? (Age, sex, location, and so on)
How many participants did you have?
How did you recruit your participants?
How did you compensate your participants?
How did you test the participants, as individuals or as groups?

Materials (10)
 What materials did you use? Specify computer and software. Add reference.
Describe in detail if these are not standard materials.
Describe the stimuli in detail (Refer to MEL LAB for these details, also run the experiment again to get the details from the computer screens. Run the experiment in “demo” mode.

Design (5)
 What type of design did you use? (Within-subject, between-subject, or mixed design)
What are the independent variables and what are the levels of each?
What is the dependent variable?
Specify the statistical tests used.

Procedure (10)
 How did the experimenter conduct the experiment?
What were the instructions? What did the participants do?
Is the experimental manipulation clear?
What control features did you use? (Random assignment, counterbalancing, and so on)
Avoid redundancy.

Writing the Results section (Continue pages from Method section, 10)

 Specify what constituted the data. State whether you found a significant main effect for the independent variable. Write the appropriate statistics [e.g., F(1, 46) = 8.41, p < .05, ηP = 0.07, see page 117 of APA manual]. State and compare the means and SE [e.g., M = 45.23, SE = 2.34] for pairs of conditions when using post-hoc Tukey HSD test. Say whether each pair comparison was statistically significant (use p-values from the post-hoc test). State your results in words, as if you were supporting the hypothesis.

Writing the Discussion section (Continue pages from Results section, 10)

 Reiterate your hypothesis. Specify which ones are significant and which ones are not. Interpret your results, i.e., to say that your treatments lead to change in your measures and not confounding variables. State what does that mean in terms of a phenomenon under study. Align your results in light of theories or models. Rectify contradictions or clarify ideas in the light of previous studies. Talk about the implications of the study and propose future studies.

Reference page (New page, 5)

Write three references. Check APA manual and section 6.22, for formatting references.

Figure page (New page, 10)

See section 5.23 in the APA manual for making figures. The figure caption and the figure itself are on the figure page. Figure pages are numbered. The caption comes on top of the figure.

 

Total Points for Lab 2: 80