CogLab Reports

Purpose
The purpose of these assignments is to give you hands-on experience working with some of the
experiments that we discuss in class. You will also interpret your own personal data and
compare it to the expected results and global data from thousands of people who have
participated in these experiments before. You will also practice writing up and interpreting your
data in a lab report, and you will practice searching for relevant background sources and citing
them.

Lab Report
After you participate in the lab, you must write about your results in a lab report. Each lab report
will have three main sections.

Section 1: Introduction and Method

In this section, you must read and cite the original article that the lab is based on, discuss the
purpose and goals of the lab, read and cite a modern article related to this lab, mention the
variables in the lab (independent and dependent variables), describe the procedure of the lab,
and make a hypothesis for the expected results of the lab based on the background research.

Right now, you might be wondering, how do I find the original article and a modern article?
Let’s start with the original empirical article. Each experiment that you do is based on a
published article. You must find, read, and cite that article. Each of those articles is listed
below:

Risky Decisions: Kahneman & Tversky, 1982

To find that article, you will use https://scholar.google.com. All you need to do is type in the
author last names, the year of the study, and you should easily be able to find the article. There
should be a full-text linked PDF to the article, which you can see on the right side. Importantly,
you should never buy an article. The free version is always available somewhere.

The second article that you must read is a modern application of this finding. You can read and
cite any article that is based on the experiment in the lab, but it must have an applied component
to it. For example, if I were doing the lexical decision task lab, I would cite an article about how
lexical decision task performance is related to bilingual language processing. This is an applied
article because it is related to a real-world concept (being able to speak multiple languages). To
find this article, you will also use https://scholar.google.com. You should type in the name of the
lab, read some article titles until you find something interesting and relevant, and then read the
abstract for more detail. If the article looks good to use, then find the full-text PDF and read it.
In the introduction section, you will cite this article, briefly describe it, and discuss how its
findings are relevant.

To summarize, here’s what must be done in the introduction section:

Read, cite, and discuss the original article
 Discuss the goals and purpose of the experiment
Read, cite, and discuss a modern applied article
Mention the independent and dependent variables in the lab and describe the procedure
Make a hypothesis of the predicted pattern of results in the lab

Section 2: Results
In this section, you must mention the main outcome of the experiment, whether this is in line
with your hypothesis, a potential explanation any inconsistent or weird results, what the global
results showed and if your results are consistent with the global results. Finally, you must
include the figure of your data, and the figure of the global data.

Section 3: Discussion
I will provide you with several questions to answer in the discussion section for each lab. Each
lab will have questions specific to that lab. Your answers should be about a paragraph for each
question.

Grading
Each lab is worth 20 points each which is 100 points total. Coglabs are weighted as 20% of your
final grade (4% each). Please see the grading rubric on the next page for more details.

Formatting
Each lab report should be double spaced, 12 font, and either Times New Roman or Calibri. If
you want to practice APA format you should do so, but I will not take off any points for incorrect
APA formatting. You should label each of the three sections, include your name, and the title of
the lab.
Plagiarism
All of your writing should be in your own words. Any writing copied from the book, articles,
online resources, peers, or anywhere else is considered plagiarism and you will receive a 0 for
that assignment. DO NOT COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE COGLAB WEBSITE!!!

CogLab Grading Rubric

Section Item Points Description

Introduction Purpose/Goal __ / 1 Accurately identify the purpose or goals of the
and Method current experiment
Section Cite Research __ / 2 Cite the original empirical article and an article
that is a modern application of this lab
Variables __ / 2 Name the independent and dependent variables
in the lab
Design/Procedure __ / 2 Briefly describe the design and what you did in
the experiment
Hypothesis __ / 1 What was the expected outcome or predicted
pattern of results
Results Figures __ / 2 Include and label the figure for your own and
the global data
 Explain Results __ / 2 Put your results into words/interpret what you
found, relate to hypothesis and global data
Discussion Questions __ / 8 Accurately answer each of the four discussion
questions
Total __ / 20

CogLab #X: Lexical Decision (Sample Report)

Introduction & Method

The purpose of this experiment was to determine how the mental lexicon is organized.

The mental lexicon is a dictionary in our mind that stores the meanings of all words that we

know. The researchers who originally discovered this effect wanted to investigate whether there

is any organization to this mental lexicon (Fischler, 1977). For example, if the mental lexicon is

organized, then words that are close in meaning should be stored closely together. Words such

as cat and dog should be stored next to each other whereas words such as fork and tree should be

stored farther apart. The closeness in storage would determine how quickly words are responded

to. For example, if I process the word dog, I should then be faster to process the word cat

because they are stored closely together. The activation of the word dog would then activate the

word cat. On the other hand, activation of the word fork would not activate the word tree, and I

would therefore not respond any faster to the word tree after processing the word fork. This

effect has been used in applied research to study the mental lexicon of children with dyslexia.

Lexical decision response patterns of children with dyslexia indicate that they do not process

words as whole units as non-dyslexic readers do (Araujo et al., 2014).

The independent variable in this study is the relatedness of the word pairs. Word pairs

were either closely related (cat:dog) or not closely related (fork:desk). There were also non-

words (flurp) in this experiment that functioned as a control group. The dependent, or outcome

variable, was the reaction time. Reaction time is a measure of how long it takes someone to
respond to a stimulus. If you respond more quickly, then it was easier for you to process that

stimulus. The opposite can be said if you respond more slowly.

The design of the experiment was as follows: A plus sign (+) was presented in the center

of the screen to focus the participant’s attention. After a delay, the plus sign disappeared and a

word appeared. The participant had to press the “m” button if the stimulus was a real word, and

the “z” button if the stimulus was not a real word. After each trial, the participant pressed the n

button to control the onset of the next stimulus trial. There were 96 trials. If the participant

answered incorrectly then the participant was notified and the word appeared again later in the

experiment.

I expected that words that were closely associated would have faster reaction times

because of the closeness of the organization in the lexicon. Words that were unrelated would be

responded to more slowly because they were not closely related in the lexicon. Non-words

would be responded to the slowest because they do not exist in the lexicon. If the mental lexicon

is not organized, then there would not be a difference in reaction times between associated and

unassociated words.

Results

The main finding of this experiment is that there was a difference between associated in

unassociated words, but this went in the opposite direction of the hypothesis. This can be seen in

Figure 1. My reaction times to associated words was 656.50ms and my reaction time to

unassociated words was 592.62ms. However, both words were responded to more quickly than

non-words, which had an average reaction time of 821.75ms.

Figure 1. Reaction times to associated, unassociated, and nonwords in milliseconds for my

personal data (ms).

This finding is surprising given the hypothesis. One explanation might be that there were

outliers in the original data set. Typically, researchers review each trial and determine if there

were outliers that could be skewing the data. I looked through the trial by trial data, and it

appeared as though one of the associated trials had a very high reaction time. This could be

artificially increasing the average reaction time for that condition, and not truly representative of

the actual result. If I removed that trial it is likely that the results would have been as predicted.

The global data were perfectly as predicted, which can be seen in Figure 2. One

difference between my personal data and the global data is the overall reaction times. My

reaction times were much faster than those of the global data by about 100ms. This quite a large

difference and represents some processing differences. One potential explanation for this is that

I have a Ph.D. and study language. My knowledge about words is likely to be superior to those
of the average participant in this study, so I would on average respond faster to these words than

other participants.

Figure 2. Reaction times to associated, unassociated, and nonwords in milliseconds for the

global data (ms).

Discussion

Overall, my data would suggest that the mental lexicon is not organized meaningfully, or

even might suggest that the lexicon is purposefully organized in an unmeaningful way.

However, we know this not to be the case because the global data of thousands of participants

suggests otherwise (in addition to countless other studies). As discussed previously, it is likely

that an outlier in one of the conditions resulted in the surprising results in the opposite direction

of the hypotheses.

Question 1:

Answer (about a paragraph)

Question 2:
 Answer (about a paragraph)

Question 3:

Answer (about a paragraph)

Question 4:

Answer (about a paragraph)