Cognition in Film

Write collaboratively a 5-7 page paper (double-spaced, excluding the title page and the References page). You will select a feature film and a journal article that represents some topic in cognitive psychology. You should use APA style for formatting throughout, including your in-text citations and your reference page.

There are some rhetorical moves that you are expected to make in the paper. While there isn’t a single definitive way to write a compelling paper, the following elements are expected and have points associated with them in the grading rubric:

• • • A. Set the stage. In your opening paragraph(s) set the stage:
      • Introduce your cognitive topic. Use the appropriate terminology by providing the necessary definitions or by providing examples. Do not use any psychological jargon without defining it first (e.g., “inattention blindness”, “anterograde amnesia”, “consolidation”, “retrieval cue”, etc.). Assume that your reader is a layperson and does not share the background you have in cognitive psychology.
      • Add a thesis or orienting statement: In the opening paragraph (typically either at the very beginning or the end), outline your goal for this paper. Your broad goal is: “to discuss how [topic X] is exemplified in [film A]”. You might develop a thesis or a more specific goal in the process of writing the paper, so qualify that statement accordingly (e.g., by adding “by highlighting the ways in which the film portrays [the phenomenon] accurately and the ways in which it does not”).
    • B. In the next one or two paragraph(s), describe some key findings and/or theoretical frameworks concerning your cognitive topic. At this stage, you need to cite some literature: this can include your selected research article(s) and/or material presented in our Goldstein textbook. Select findings and/or theoretical models that you can later relate to your film.
    • C. Next, describe your film. You can start by providing a general overview of the plot,followed by a description of specific scenes that are related to your topic. You must provide a detailed description of at least one scene. (The order of C and D may alternate, depending on what makes most sense for the information flow in your paper.)
    • D. Make connections between the film and the cognitive topic. How was the cognitive phenomenon exemplified in the scene(s) you just described?
    • E. Evaluate how the cognitive phenomenon was depicted in the film. Is the representation of the cognitive phenomenon accurate based on what we know from experimental, neuroscientific, or neuropsychological evidence (covered in your research article and/or textbook)? Is the representation of the cognitive phenomenon inaccurate? If so, in which ways is it inaccurate? In general, at this juncture of your paper evaluate the extent to which the representation of your topic is pretty realistic in the film, closer to fiction, or somewhere in between.
    • F. Finally, wrap up your paper with some concluding remarks. This can include a summary of the main points you made in the paper: e.g., how this cognitive phenomenon is represented in the film and whether it’s represented accurately. You can also reflect on the role of movies on how people’s beliefs about how the mind works are influenced by movies and other cultural artifacts (e.g., is it problematic if cognitive phenomena are misrepresented in films? should films and other art forms be expected to portray cognition veridically? etc.). There is no single recipe for how to end your paper, but aim to end on a strong and compelling point!