Rats With Hippocampal Lesions example essay topic

science. Therefore, make the data the subject of your sentence: "Hippocampal lesions impair delayed conditional discrimination (Smith, 1984) " is preferable to "Smith (1984) showed that hippocampal lesions impair delayed conditional discriminations". 2. "Found", "observed", and "showed" are almost always inappropriate: "Hippocampal lesions impaired discrimination" is preferable to "Hippocampal lesions were found to impair discrimination".

Obviously, if you know this result, somebody found it. Unless you want to emphasize history about the process of finding, the result is important, not the process. 3. Issues are most important; previous experiments are subordinate. A good issue is worth examining even if no one has studied it before. You should present issues first, and previous experiments (if any) second.

4. It is always incorrect to start a sentence with the impersonal form of the word "it". The word is meaningless. Delete "it" and substitute the important noun. 5. Leading nouns in a sentence can organize ideas.

A sentence should begin with the most important information (this also holds for paragraphs; lead with the important information). "Rats with hippocampal lesions were impaired in conditional discriminations". ... is a good construction if the results are being compared to those from monkeys but a bad construction if hippocampal lesions in rats are being compared to amygdala lesions in rats. If you wish to emphasize a comparison of brain regions then your sentence should be constructed as follows: "Hippocampal lesions impaired conditional discriminations in rats but amygdala lesions did not". 6. Pronouns are almost always inappropriate unless you are telling a personal story.

The fact that you are involved in the enterprise is not relevant to the scientific merit of the discussion. 7. The word "since" refers to the passage of time, and not logic. When logic is involved, the correct word is "because."Because hippocampal lesions impair memory, they should disrupt performance in this task" is preferable to "Since hippocampal lesions... ". 8.

The term "elicit" means "to draw forth or bring out". It is inappropriate to say: "The rat elicited sexual behavior after hormone injections". The rat may have displayed sexual behavior, or increased its the frequency of its sexual behavior, but unless it stimulated another rat or the experimenter to show sexual behavior, it did not elicit sexual behavior! 9.

Try to use the words "which" and "that" appropriately. Generally, "which" is preceded by a comma! "The rats that had the amygdala lesions were more aggressive". (tells which rats were more aggressive) "The remaining rat, which had the unusual drug reaction, is not included in the results". (adds a fact about the only rat in question).