Lab 5: Span Tasks and APA Introductions Andrew Reineberg

Your papers from last week Common mistakes: – Motivation Part of scientific process is showing that your topic is something people have/are studying We usually do this with either citations or solid reason for totally exploratory experiments – APA style (see next slide)

Citation Style In body of text: – Cite within sentence: Barrs (2010) notes that by using terms such as mind wandering, task unrelated thought, or daydreaming, experimenters are obscuring the possibility that spontaneous thougths are actually relevant to the life and goals of the participant. – Cite at end of sentence: Using terms such as mind wandering, task unrelated thought, or daydreaming, experimenters are obscuring the possibility that spontaneous thougths are actually relevant to the life and goals of the participant (Barrs, 2010).

Citations Within Body cont’d – Always cite both authors if exactly 2 – 3, 4, or 5 authors? Reichle, Reineberg, & Schooler (2010) found… = First time ever Reichle et al. (2010) found… = First time in paragraph Reichle et al. found… = Second or more time in paragraph – 6 authors? For Smith, A., Johnson, B., Cohen, C., Baars, D., Lincoln, E., & Washington, F. (2011): Smith et al. (2011) = First time and first time in new paragraph Smith et al. = Second or more time in paragraph

Quotes Try and avoid these at all cost. If necessary, do it right. Long quotes: New paragraph, smaller text, indented on both sides Most people can recall times in which they became aware that they were thinking about something spontaneously rather than fully attending to the task at hand. As stated by Antrobus and colleagues (1966): It is indeed remarkable that (participants) can receive signals at a rate of 1/sec., accurately judge whether each signal is the same or different from the pitch of the preceding signal, and…at the same time imagine sailing with his friends during his forthcoming holiday. (p. 406)

References Section Books (should be technical or review in nature, no encyclopedias) : – Schooler, J. W., Reichle, E. D., & Halpern, D. V. (2004). Zoning out while reading: Evidence for dissociations between experience and metaconsciousness. In D. T. Levin (Ed.), Thinking and seeing: Visual metacognition in adults and children, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Journals: – Reichle, E. D., Reineberg, A. E., & Schooler, J. W. (2010). Eye movements during mindless reading. Psychological Science, 21 (9), – Font same as body of article. – First letter of title and subtitle capitalized. Websites: – Don’t do it.

Introduction Section Start with your title, not “Introduction” Introduce your topic: – “The phenomenon of mindless reading is common—many peo- ple have had the experience of suddenly realizing that, although their eyes have been moving across the printed page, little or none of what they have been “reading” has been pro- cessed in a meaningful manner.”

Introduction cont’d Why is your topic important? How does it relate to previous studies? – “Despite how frequently it (mindless reading) occurs, however, very little is known about what happens in the mind during mindless reading. This is unfortunate, because, if estimates of how often the mind wanders are accurate (e.g., 30% of daily life; Kane et al., 2007), and if claims that mind wandering is detrimental to reading comprehension are correct (Schooler, McSpadden, Reichle, & Smallwood, 2010; Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008), then an understanding of mindless reading could prove highly beneficial.“

Introduction cont’d What are your hypotheses? – “Our central hypothesis was that fixations during mindless reading should be qualitatively different than fixa- tions associated with normal reading; specifically, fixations during mindless reading should have longer durations (as observed during z reading) and less sensitivity to lexical vari- ables (e.g., word frequency) than fixations during normal reading. These effects are normally indicative of on-line cog- nitive processing.”

Introduction cont’d Briefly explain how your approach solves the problems proposed in the literature. – “The present study provides important new informationabout mindless reading by using an experience-sampling method that we used previously to study mind wandering in other tasks (including self-paced reading; Sayette, Reichle, & Schooler, 2009).” – “The present experiment avoided the limitations of thez-reading paradigm by measuring readers’ eye movements during periods of both normal reading and actual mindless reading.”

General Notes Scientific writing does not have to be boring. – Be clear but use style Personal pronouns CAN be okay: – Use “the experimenter” or “we” if >1 exptr

Span Tasks What is similar and different about the two span task we did: – Memory Span – Operation Span

What are we testing? Degree to which performance on one task explains performance on the other task Statistically, we are interested specifically in the correlation between the two. – In R, we can do this analysis 2 ways: Simple correlation: cor(memory, operation) or cor.test() Linear model: lm(memory ~ operation) Same result, different methods

Go now to website Make Analysis.R file detailing commands for R to interpret Make data.txt containing our classes data