psych cognitive neuroscience research proposal

A proposal must include:

a) Background but just enough so we understand why the research question is so interesting and novel.

b) Hypothesis Clearly state your hypothesis, and support it, showing that it is not trivial, could plausibly be wrong, and is derived from theoretically meaningful ideas in the specific field of research. A smart idea is to build a critique of a previous paper into a new testable hypothesis

c) Methods detailing both the behavioural (task) methods and brain-activity (e.g., EEG or fMRI) methods, including what you will measure and what you will compare.

d) Potential Diagnostic Results referring to a prediction figure (see next). Be very specific, explain how you would evaluate the results with respect to your hypothesis, and include at least two plausible outcomes that could each tell us something different, and state what those different conclusions would be. Dont include anticipated details of the results that do not directly speak to your hypothesis (e.g., no passive lists of brain regions).

e) Prediction Figure A fully labelled figure illustrating your chief prediction *and* alternative prediction. Walk the audience through the key aspects of the results that are illustrated in the figure, that would specifically inform the hypothesis. The figure may be hand-drawn and scanned, or created in a draw/paint program, or modified from a journal article figure or other source (but in that case, the original source must be fully referenced).

(Usually you will want an illustration of the task/procedure or timeline of the experiment).

Wrap up the proposal nicely, with a take-home message bringing home for the audience what we stand to learn, depending on the anticipated results and alternatives.

Think of the goal as persuading a hypothetical funding agency to fund your project. So you want the viewer to understand where the idea comes from, that it is novel (but only very minimally because it needs to be feasible too), and show how your experimental design is sure to answer one question one way or another: so that’s why illustrating two plausible but different results can be extremely compelling: we might get outcome A or B, but we don’t know which we will get, and if it is A, we will learn X; if B, we will learn Y.

I have already chose a topic that I want to write this research proposal on but it needs some work,

this is was the hypothesis. (Following sleep deprivation, threat-related emotional stimuli (e.g., fear and anger) will elicit greater amygdala activation and reduced prefrontalamygdala functional connectivity compared to non-threat negative and neutral stimuli.)

then this was the evaluator’s response to it was (This was okay but could have been conceptualized a lot stronger. No alternative hypothesis (nor what we could learn from a different outcome). Very little about your brain-activity measure, nothing about the timing of your task but that is the hardest thing about fMRI research. )

now I want you to take these comments into account and structure the research proposal accordingly you can change the hypothesis but I need you to propose it to me before starting the paper so I can run it by the person, and see if he approves.

this is the guidelines for the research proposal. I will attach everything you need to complete this paper, but please stay away from ai.

• Topic:
• a) Have some tie-in to the course
• b) Have some clear outcome measure
• c) … and some idea of alternative outcomes that could tell us something different.
• Content: be sure to include
• –Slides.
• –A hypothesis you are thinking of testing with the experiment
• –Some impression of the background literature, other research that has been done, that you plan to draw upon
• –Some idea of why the experiment could be interesting
• –Some idea of what you might measure
• –A statistical test that would test a prediction that follows from the hypothesis
• A good research proposal is:
• –Novel
• –Interesting/informative in some way
• –Feasible [that means it is best to work closely based on methods that have already been proven in published research]
• Have a look at what work has been published, on the topics you are considering. My best advice: pubmed, via the library’s web site (search under “databases”) – if you do that, then the “Get It” links usually work, and let you download the pdfs by way of the library’s subscriptions which they have already paid for, for us. Web of Science is also good – and it is particularly good for citations searches – e.g., if you find a good classic article, find it in web of science, then click on the *number* of times it was cited – that brings up the list of papers that did the citing, which would be more recent. In that way, you can often find more up-to-date works that are relevant for the topic you are interested in.
• NOTE: References on slides- I find those not so useful, because the slides go by too fast. My favourite style is the short in-line reference (Miller et al., 1956) and if it might be ambiguous, then the journal name as well. People can jot that down quickly, at least. [But don’t assume other instructors have the same expectations]. Full reference lists, of course, are essential for papers.

If you have any question please reach out to me and ask before you began so I can clarify any misunderstanding.