To emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science, the paper will be written as a collaboration with another student who works in a department different from your own. To make it easier for you to find a collaborator, we will ask you to email us (by this deadline) a summary of your background and your research interests. We will compile and distribute them electronically.
Once you and your collaborator have agreed to a topic, you will propose it to one of the instructors (closest to your topic). The paper proposals are due by this deadline, but it is to your advantage to do it a lot earlier. The idea is to get feedback on the topic, and references to the literature, and to make sure your paper is not too ambitious to be finished before the end of the semester.
The last class meeting will be devoted to short project presentations. These are not supposed to be formal talks, but rather informal discussions of what you did in your project. You should put down your main ideas on a couple of slides, and explain what the project was about and what your conclusions were. The presentation should take no more than 10 minutes, so that we have at least 5 minutes for discussion. The presentation can be done with one person representing the whole group, or you can divide it up among yourselves. Try to keep it as informal as possible and encourage discussion, but keep in mind that we will have to cut you off after 15 minutes!
Note that it should go without saying that the work you turn in for this class will represent your own efforts. Plagiarism--that is, turning in work that is not your own--will merit an F (specifically, a zero) for the assignment in question. Copying material from a published (or unpublished) source without proper citation and without the use of quotation marks constitutes plagiarism.