Description

Question

Hint: The big question is not explicitly stated in the paper, but the specific question is. You may want to start with the specific question, then determine what broader, more general issues the specific question taps into.

What is the big question being asked by this research project?

What accounts for our difficulty with viewing upside-down faces?

What is the specific question being asked by this research project?

Does a general impairment on mono-oriented objects when inverted account for the difficulty with viewing upside-down faces?

Alternative

Hint: The hypothesis should be a possible answer to the specific question, not a prediction (that comes later).

What are the author’s hypotheses?

H1:  A general impairment on mono-oriented objects when inverted effects one’s ability to recognize upside-down faces.

H2:  A general impairment on mono-oriented objects when inverted does not effect one’s ability to recognize upside-down faces.

*Ellie’s note: In addition to grasping our hypotheses, we also must make sure we understand what it is that we are actually comparing.

“Performance on upright and inverted tasks for faces was compared with that for other classes of everyday objects having a priori properties similar to faces in being mono-oriented, familiar, complex, and not easily verbalized, i.e., objects that are not distinguished from each other by the use of simple labels.”

Logic

*Ellie’s note: We also want to make sure that we understand the logic of doing this experiment at all based on the existing literature. You can think of this as “zoomed out logic”. Where does the literature leave off for us to pick up?

“The investigators did not indicate, however, the extent of homogeneity among the pictures or the degree to which the pictures were of objects that are customarily mono-oriented.”

Hint: The logic should come from the hypothesis and relate to the manipulations in the experiments. That is, if it turns out H1 is true, what kind of behavior should we expect in the experiment?

What is the logic of the hypothesis (if A is true, then what should happen?)

-       If H1, then… participants will make more errors recognizing inverted images than upright images.

-       If H2, then…participants will make the same amount of errors whether recognizing inverted images or upright images.