Choose one of the article listed below.
Brielmann AA & Pelli DG (2017) Beauty requires thought. Current Biology 27(10): 1513.e3.
Denison R, Heeger D & Carrasco M (2017) Attention flexibly trades off across points in time. Psychon Bull Rev 24(4): 1142-1151.
Dunsmoor JE & Murphy GL (2014) Stimulus typicality determines how broadly fear is generalized. Psychological Science 25(9): 1816-1821.
Goedert KM, Ellefson MR & Rehder B (2014) Differences in the weighting and choice of evidence for plausible versus implausible causes. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40(3): 683-702.
Martin AE & McElree B (2018) Retrieval cues and syntactic ambiguity resolution: Speed-accuracy tradeoff evidence. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33(6): 769-783.
Read the articles and write a two-page critique.
The critiques should identify the scientific claim being made by the researcher, describe the
kinds of subjects (participants) used to provide data, summarize the methods used to collect
data, describe the way the researcher analyzed and interpreted the data to make the
scientific claim. In the last paragraph list what you think are two strengths and two
weaknesses of the study.
This paper is to be a one-page, single-spaced paper, 1-inch margins, and Times New Roman, Font Size 12.
Please note that we will be checking for plagiarism (through TurnItIn.com), so make sure you present
your own ideas and arguments, and please do not copy/paste from the article text– not even to quote.
Always paraphrase or reword to present your thoughts instead of quoting.
1. Summary
The first thing you should do in your paper is briefly summarize the article. The summary should look
something like a shorter abstract of the paper, in your own words. It should present in a few sentences
(usually no more than 150 words total) the gist of the theory, method, findings, and conclusions.
2. Strengths
Following the summary paragraph, we would like you to write a brief (2-3 sentence) paragraph with
a few key strengths of the article. These strengths can be about any specific section of the paper or
about the paper as a whole. Please be thoughtful of which strengths you choose. They shouldn’t be
inconsequential to the integrity of the research study as a whole, but rather the shining stars of the
research paper, its methodologies, and its contributions.
3. Critique
In the rest of the paper you should describe and address two main weaknesses of the article. You
should indicate what the weakness is (make sure to say which experiment you’re referring to if that is
where the weakness is), explain why it is a weakness (why does it matter?), and finally propose a way
that this weakness could be rectified or improved in future research studies.
Try your best not to have both critiques be about the same section of the paper. That is, there are four
sections from which to choose – (1) Introduction/Theoretical Background, (2) Method, (3) Results, and
(4) Discussion/Conclusions. For example, your first weakness could come from the Method, and the
second from the Discussion/Conclusions, but both cannot come from the Method.
You should take time to read the entire paper as you probably do not want to identify a weakness in a
study that is addressed in one of the later studies in the paper or that is explicitly mentioned by the
authors themselves. The stronger and more thoughtful and coherent your arguments are, the better your
critique will be
