In this famous paper by Brenda Milner and colleagues, note how clear and concise the abstract is.

THE PRESENT report has three aims. In the first place, it describes the persistent features of a severe amnesic syndrome acquired 14 years ago, following bilateral mesial temporal lobectomy (Scoville [28]). Secondly, the report attempts to give further substance to our previously held belief that the patient's perceptual and intellectual capacities remain intact, as manifested by normal or superior performance on a fairly wide range of experimental tasks. Thirdly, we are exploring the nature of the memory detect in some detail by trying to discover which learning tasks the patient can master, as compared with those on which he always fails.

======================================================== Thisisoneofthemostfamouspapersinallofcognitivepsychology,anditwas publishedinthesomewhatstodgyandformaljournal"PsychologicalReview." Notehowtheauthornotonlyusesthefirstperson,butusestheopening paragraphstoconstructanarrative.Makenomistakethisisaveryformaland theoreticalpaper.Butthewritingstyleisfunandrefreshing.

From:Miller,G.A.(1956).Themagicalnumberseven,plusorminustwo:Somelimitsonour capacityforprocessinginformation.ThePsychologicalReview,63,8197. My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution. I shall begin my case history by telling you about some experiments that tested how accurately people can assign numbers to the magnitudes of various aspects of a stimulus. In the traditional language of psychology these would be called experiments in absolute judgment. Historical accident, however, has decreed that they should have another name. We now call them experiments on the capacity of people to transmit information. Since these experiments would not have been done without the appearance of information theory on the psychological scene, and since the results are analyzed in terms of the concepts of information theory, I shall have to preface my discussion with a few remarks about this theory.

AswiththeMillerexcerpt,notehowtheauthorusesthefirstperson,andhowhe revealsapersonalnarrativetomotivatehisresearch.Thisonealsoturnedoutto beoneofthemostinfluentialpapersincognitivepsychology. QuarterlyJournalofExperimentalPsychology(1980)32,325.

OrientingofAttention
MichaelI.Posner Introduction Sir Frederic Bartlett wrote a book, Thinking, during the last part of his life (Bartlett, 1958). It is not as widely known as his earlier work, Remembering (Bartlett, 1932), but it had a strong impact on me, perhaps because it was among the first psychology books I read. Bartlett's theme was as simple as it was powerful. Thinking is a skill and should be studied with the techniques that had proved successful in the study of other skilled behavior. In particular, I was struck with Bartlett's metaphor that thinking like swinging a bat, has a "point of no return". Once committed in a particular direction, thought is ballistic in that it cannot be altered. It may be hard to understand why this idea should have been so exciting to someone reading the psychological literature in 1959. In retrospect, what captured the imagination must have been the idea that a hidden psychological process like the formation of a thought might be rendered sufficiently concrete to measure. Twenty years later, when psychologists routinely measure the speed of rotation of visual images (Cooper and Shepard, 1973) or the time needed to scan the next item of an internally sorted list (Sternberg, 1969), it is hard to reinstate the excitement hat the prospect of such research could have engendered in at least one reader of Bartlett's book.