Honours

Project themes, a roadmap for first semester and the proposal, for students doing Honours in the Meta Lab.

Project themes

Each year we choose three areas of interest that come with ready-to-use paradigms. Choose from the three below, and tell Kit your preferences in the first week or two of Honours.

  • 01

    Reactivity to think-aloud protocols

    Test whether verbalising thoughts changes performance on rule-based discovery and complex reasoning tasks.

    More about this theme

    Reactivity is a core methodological challenge: the act of observing a cognitive process can change it. This project asks whether thinking aloud alters performance when tasks involve complex reasoning, and whether the effect extends beyond simple verification to more abstract rule discovery and relationship detection.

    Starter readings

    • Double, K. S., Tran, D., & Goldwater, M. B. (2025). Judgments of learning impair rule-based discovery. Memory & Cognition, 1–14.
    • Fox, M. C., & Charness, N. (2010). How to gain eleven IQ points in ten minutes: Thinking aloud improves Raven’s Matrices performance in older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 17(2), 191–204.
  • 02

    Variation in cognitive performance and metacognition

    Examine within-person fluctuations in performance and how they relate to metacognitive processes.

    More about this theme

    Fluctuations in cognitive performance are a near-universal experience, but they have often been treated as noise or error. This project treats those within-person shifts as systematic and asks how the architecture of variability is organised, and how changes in performance are tied to metacognitive processes.

    Starter readings

    • Vaughan, A. C., & Birney, D. P. (2023). Within-individual variation in cognitive performance is not noise: Why and how cognitive assessments should examine within-person performance. Journal of Intelligence, 11(6), 110.
    • Birney, D. P., Beckmann, J. F., Beckmann, N., & Double, K. S. (2017). Beyond the intellect: Complexity and learning trajectories in Raven’s Progressive Matrices depend on self-regulatory processes and conative dispositions. Intelligence, 61, 63–77.
  • 03

    Biases in metacognitive beliefs and causal learning

    Study how people misjudge which strategies work and how causal instruction shapes those beliefs.

    More about this theme

    A major problem in education is that people often fail to recognise which study strategies actually produce better outcomes. This project treats metacognition as a form of causal learning, asking how students form beliefs about what works, why they sometimes prefer ineffective strategies, and how those biases can be corrected.

    Starter readings

    • Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64(1), 417–444.
    • Double, K. S., Chow, J. Y., Livesey, E. J., & Hopfenbeck, T. N. (2020). Causal illusions in the classroom: How the distribution of student outcomes can promote false instructional beliefs. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1), 34.

First semester roadmap

A rough guide to how it usually unfolds, from your first meeting to your second experiment. Each step is roughly one meeting, but the pace will vary from project to project. Pick a step to see what to prepare beforehand and what we aim to settle when we meet.

Proposal

Write a short proposal of about 1,000 words. The background explains why the method matters. The method is the detailed, useful part, and it is what gets the feedback. Aim to make the method easy to judge and improve.

Background

  • Keep it to about 500 words.
  • Explain the problem, and why it’s important.
  • It is basically the opening and the research questions sections of the introduction in the writing guide.
  • Give enough context for good feedback. You don’t need a full literature review.
  • AI can help it read smoothly, but treat that as polishing. The proposal is not marked.

Method

  • Keep it to about 500 words.
  • Make it detailed and concrete, so readers can tell whether the study will actually work.
  • Use figures where they help explain the procedure, the sequence of a trial or the materials.
  • AI can help draft and tighten it, but aim for clarity and feasibility rather than polish.

The proposal meeting

  1. 7daysSend it to KitA week before the meeting.
  2. 3daysSend it to the reviewerThree days before the meeting.
  3. 0daysMeetTalk through the feedback.
  • Use Kit’s calendar to find a time, and CC Kit and reply all when setting up the meeting so everyone knows when it is.
  • You’ll be asked to respond to the reviewer’s comments. Keep your reply to a few sentences, as it is only a formality.