[Instant Solution] Exhibit Shorter Attention Spans

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Developmental Psychology is one of my favorite journals (you can find a paper there that Dr. Schmitt and I wrote together!) ! 

Take another look for the estimated review time. You can get a sense of this on the publications themselves. At the end of each publication after the References, you will find that it reports submission date, revision and acceptance dates. This can help give you a general idea of the timeline by looking at a few of these.

Let’s take a look at your hypothesis: 

Older adults will exhibit shorter attention spans compared to younger individuals due to age-related cognitive decline

You DO include the variables AGE and ATTENTION (notice I put them in the matching color).  

However, you also included an explanation: ” due to age-related cognitive decline”. What you wrote is the start of what is called a Conceptual Hypothesis, where as part of your hypothesis you also include the reasoning behind or leading up to your hypothesis.  Conceptual hypotheses include citations and are a bit longer with detail to support your reasoning.   We are writing what is closer to an Operational Hypothesis, where we are only including what we are actually measuring. The best operational hypotheses include the actual way the variables are being measured. So, for example: 

Older adults will exhibit shorter attention spans compared to younger adults as measured by the time spent on the X task. 

We can also write general hypotheses, without specific measurements but with clear variables: 

H1: Older adults will exhibit shorter attention spans compared to younger adults.