Writing your Abstract

An abstract presents a short summary of your completed research. Remember to include all relevant information but also to keep your abstract succinct and stick to the suggested word limit (between 100–150 words).

Writing your Introduction

As this is the first mini project report on DE200, the module team have provided below a list of topic-based information to include in the Introduction to your report, in the order in which it should appear. Remember, your introduction should be written in prose and serve as a justification for your research. In this case, you should:

1. It is essential that you start by defining change blindness, using Section 3 of Book 2, Chapter 3.

• What is it?
• Why is it important?
• What does it tell us about perception?

2. Outline key research on change blindness using Sections 3.2 and 3.3 of the chapter You should draw upon:

• Rensink, O’Regan and Clark’s (1997) Flicker method and the attentional blink. Briefly explain the procedure and their findings.The authors claim that full attention, and high-level interest, is needed to detect changes. Their findings show differences in reaction times for detection of central and marginal changes.

In addition, you may well wish to draw upon one or more of the following sources. In doing so, you need to balance the essential requirement to provide a background to and rationale for the current experiment, with the need to write concisely and clearly.

• O’Regan, Rensink and Clark’s (1999) ‘mudsplash’ study. Briefly describe the procedure and findings. Removing the attentional blink meant visual memory was not overwritten, but change blindness still remained. The researchers suggest that the ‘mudsplashes’ made items more salient, therefore capturing attention. As with Rensink, O’Regan and Clark’s work, central changes were detected faster than marginal changes.
• Simons and Levin’s (1998) door study. Briefly explain the procedure and findings. What does this tell us about attention and the position of the change in the scene? Here you could also link to the models of attention discussed in Section 3.3 of Chapter 3 and/or Lavie’s (1995) perceptual load theory in Section 2.3.4 of Book 2, Chapter 2.
• Nisbett (2003) and Miyamoto, Nisbett and Masuda’s (2006) research on cultural environment and salient or contextual changes to a scene. Briefly explain the procedure and findings. If cultural environment can affect change blindness, what does that tell us about how individuals deploy their attention?

Remember that you also need to include research from at least two independently sourced, peer-reviewed journal articles. These additional articles should ideally be integrated into your Introduction and revisited in the Discussion. It is not conventional to first mention such articles in the Discussion unless they explain an unexpected result.

3. Explain the particular issue examined in the current study.

• Previous research has considered the position of the change as well as the impact of individual differences on change detection.
• This study varies the type of change presented: congruent, incongruent or within category.
• What can varying the type of change tell us? Think about what previous research has identified regarding salience and context.

4. Formally state your hypothesis or research question. Importantly, your introduction should finish with a statement of the hypothesis for your study.

Writing your Methods section – a quick note on procedure

As part of TMA 02, you will be given a data set that contains data from 250 participants who completed the experiment you took part in. You need to write up your report (including the Methods section) as if you collected all of this data yourself. This means that your Participants section should refer to information about all of the participants in your data set as if you recruited them yourself from the DE200 cohort.

Likewise, your Procedure section should describe what steps all of the participants in your data set went through when completing the study, not just what your particular participant did. Remember, this section should contain enough relevant information to allow other researchers to replicate the study.  Please make sure that you observe the conventional structure for method sections: design, participants, materials and procedure.

Writing your Results

Before you write up your results you will need to have carried out your Analysis. Details of how to do this in SPSS are given in Week 11, which also discusses how to interpret the results from an ANOVA.

In Week 14, you are given an exercise (in task 4) to try your hand at writing a results section. When you have done so a model answer is revealed. This exercise also provides a model of how to write up your TMA 02 results, indicating how your results section might be structured and what information you need to include.

Writing your Discussion

Some material for writing up your discussion can be found in Week 14. This highlights the purpose of a discussion and emphasises the need for critical evaluation. To recap, your discussion should address the following issues in order:

1. Provide a summary of your findings, stating the results of the experiment in plain language, without citing the actual statistics.
2. Provide an explanation for the results and describe how they compare with other research in the field (as laid out in the Introduction).
3. If applicable, explain how the findings could be applied in the real world.
4. Critically evaluate the study, pointing out its limitations and strengths. Make suggestions for future research