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Major Area Paper Examples

Qualifying Examination / Major Area Paper (MAP)

Examples of Previous Major Area Papers (MAPs): We have asked some of our current and former graduate students in our program to make their Major Area Papers available for other students to look at. We thank those individuals for making these available. Note that these are only accessible from a Vanderbilt IP address.

NOTE: These examples of MAPs are for the exclusive use of the graduate students in Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. They cannot be distributed, cited or quoted without the express permission of the authors.

Heidi Weisenfelder, Visual Motion Aftereffects: A review 

Narcisse Bichot (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience / Neuroscience), Psychophysics and physiology of visual selection


Gabriel Dichter (Clinical Science), Anhedonia in depression: A review

Bradley Folley (Clinical Science), The cognitive neuroscience of creativity and its relation to psychoses

Emily Grossman (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience), Solving biological motion perception: An approach inspired by Marr

Chai-Youn Kim (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience / Neuroscience), Not to see something visible: Paradigmatic phenomena for probing neural correlates of conscious visual awareness

Takashi Sato (Neuroscience), Neural coding in the nervous system

Darryl Schneider (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience), Theories of task switching: A review

Moria Smoski (Clinical Science), Mother-infant interactions and postpartum depression: Implications for treatment

Duje Tadin (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience / Neuroscience), Description and function of center-surround mechanisms in cortical area MT

Eunice Yang (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience). The extent of visual processing under interocular suppression

Peiyan Wong (Neuroscience), Architectonic Studies: Past, Present, and Future.