Your goal in this paper is to pose a question about any topic in cognition and determine how that question has been answered in recent literature. You can explore any topic related to normal cognitive processing whether or not we have covered it in class. Focus on a very specific aspect of cognition – focus on depth instead of breadth. Write the paper so that a reader with no training in psychology could understand the topic. Imagine that you are writing for the Science section of the NY Times and must explain information from the scientific literature so that any educated person could understand it.  Organization The paper will include: 1) an overview of the general topic and your specific question, 2) evidence from at least 6 peer-reviewed journal articles that relate to your question, and 3) a conclusion about the question based on the evidence presented in the paper. Your conclusion should be a clear answer to the question and should be supported by the evidence you presented in your paper. The majority of the grade will be based on the presentation, integration and analysis of information from the articles, the clarity of the answer to the question presented in the conclusion and how well the conclusion is supported by the evidence.  Overview of topic and question. In this section you should describe the general topic, define major terms and pose the question. Describe the topic and define the terms based on the peer-reviewed articles and cite them. The definitions—like the rest of the paper—must be in your own words.  It will be best to develop definitions based on several sources. This section will be from 1 to 2 pages long. Evidence about the question. In this part of the paper, you will describe and discuss relevant information from the peer-reviewed articles in order to answer your question.  Organize this section by topic and integrate information from several articles in each paragraph.  This is more than a simple summary of the articles. Focus on integrating sources to answer your question. For example, to answer the question of how intelligence relates to musical training, you might identify 2 or 3 kinds of intelligence from your sources and write a section on each type of intelligence. You will likely find that the articles find different answers to your question.  In that case, you should compare and contrast the studies to determine why they come to different conclusions. Focus only on the parts of the articles that are relevant to your question—for example, an article might have 3 experiments but only 1 that is related to the question. Deciding how much detail to include from the articles’ methods and results can be tricky. Keep your question in mind while deciding and make sure the details you include are relevant to how the authors investigated the topic. Avoid details about the numbers of participants, recruiting participants, and basic experimental practices like giving consent and debriefing. Include enough detail about the study done so that the reader understands the basic method and whether the study was a correlation or an experiment. Discuss results only in words—do not include any actual statistics or numbers.  This is the major portion of the paper and should be 5 to 6 pages long. Conclusion.  As you read the articles, develop an informed opinion about the answer to your question based on the evidence in the articles. If some of the articles come to different conclusions, decide which conclusion is valid and provide a rationale. The grade on the paper depends on how well the evidence from the articles supports the conclusion. For example, if the evidence indicates that there is not a convincing relationship between musical training and intelligence, the conclusion should not be that there probably is a relationship.  The conclusion must be based only on the evidence in the paper. This section will be about 1 to 2 pages long.