The following abstract introduces an article titled “Development of the Appearance-Reality Distinction.” This article appeared in Cognitive Psychology, a specialized academic journal for researchers in the subfield of psychology that focuses on human cognition. Read this abstract carefully to see what you can infer about the discourse of cognitive psychology—about its characteristic vocabulary, style, use of evidence, and so on.Young children can express conceptual difficulties with the appearance-reality distinction in two different ways: (1) by incorrectly reporting appearance when asked to report reality (“phenomenism”); (2) by incorrectly reporting reality when asked to report appearance (“intellectual realism”). Although both phenomenism errors and intellectual realism errors have been observed in previous studies of young children’s cognition, the two have not been seen as conceptually related and only the former errors have been taken as a symptom of difficulties with the appearance-reality distinction. Three experiments investigated 3- to 5-year-old children’s ability to distinguish between and correctly identify real versus apparent object properties (color, size, and shape), object identities, object presence-absence, and action identities. Even the 3-year-olds appeared to have some ability to make correct appearance-reality discriminations and this ability increased with age. Errors were frequent, however, and almost all children who erred made both kinds. Phenomenism errors predominated on tasks where the appearance versus reality of the three object properties was in question; intellectual realism errors predominated on the other three types of tasks. Possible reasons for this curious error pattern were advanced. It was also suggested that young children’s problems with the appearance-reality distinction may be partly due to a specific metacognitive limitation, namely, a difficulty in analyzing the nature and source of their own mental representations.—JOHN H. FLAVELL, ELEANOR R. FLAVELL, AND FRANCES L. GREEN,
Cognitive Psychology

Choose a piece of writing you have produced for a class in a particular discipline—a blog or other posting, a laboratory report, a review of the literature, or any other written assignment. Examine your writing closely for its use of that discipline’s vocabulary, style, methods of proof, and conventional formats. How comfortable are you writing a piece of this kind? In what ways are you using the conventions of the discipline easily and well? What conventions give you difficulty, and why? You might talk to an instructor in this field about the conventions and requirements for writing in the discipline. Make notes about what you learn about being a better writer in the field.