Article Briefs:
o Students are required to submit 2 article brief assignments
o An article brief is a single paragraph summary of a scientific study published in an academic
journal within
the last 3 months. The student is responsible for finding a scientific paper, reading and
summarizing it.
The article must pertain to a topic on cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience. The article
brief
must also include a sentence on how directly the article relates to a chapter covered in the  course. The original article must be submitted with the brief in a PDF format. Article briefs will be
submitted via TurnItIn
and checked for authenticity.
o Article briefs are worth 12 points each. The grading criteria are as follows:
o The brief reports an empirical/scientific study, not a broad theory or review of many studies 0.5
pt
o The brief describes the question the authors tried to answer 2 pt
o The brief describes the method authors used to answer the question 2.5 pt
o The brief describes the conclusion authors reached 3 pt
o The brief includes a sentence of how the article relates to material covered in the class 2 pt
o The brief reports a study from a set of topics relevant to this course 0.5 pt
§ Brief 1 can only cover topics in Chapters 1-5: Brain, Perception, Attention, Working Memory
and Short Term Memory
§ Brief 2 can only cover topics in Chapters 6-13: Long Term Memory, Memory Errors,
Knowledge, Imagery, Problem Solving, Decision Making, Language
o The brief includes a full PDF of the article 0.5 pt
§ The PDF of an article associated with a Brief must be submitted separately to an
assignment page that looks like this:
o The article is from an approved journal and was published in the last 3 months 0.5 pt
§ All articles selected for Brief assignment must come from this set of journals: Brain, Cortex,
Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, NeuroImage, Neuron
§ • http://sfxna11.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/01uho/az/default
§ Frontiers in Psychology can be accessed directly. Note that only Frontiers in Psychology is
approved, but not in any other topic (e.g. Frontiers in Neuroscience).
• http://www.frontiersin.org/psychology
o The brief is written in no fewer than 270 and no more than 300 words, in full sentences and is
free of
grammatical and spelling errors. The brief should not include author names, affiliations, study
name
etc. 0.5 pt
o The brief has an originality score less than 20%. Otherwise, the brief will automatically receive
a
grade of 0 for the assignment and will be reported to the department as a potential plagiarism
case.
Copying sentences from the article and putting them in quotation marks is not appropriate for the
length of this assignment. Paraphrasing the authors is also not appropriate and could be
considered
plagiarism.