; PSY 1903
PSY 1903 Programming for Psychologists

Course Introduction

The following is an outline of what will be covered in class 1.

Introductions

Summary

  • What you will learn this semester and how you will expand your psychological research toolbox
  • Cultivating a problem-solving mindset

Technologies

JavaScript

  • Tool to learn the fundamentals
  • Most commonly known for its role on the web (in combination with HTML/CSS)
  • jsPsych - Utility for building web-based experiments.
    • Example: Stroop Task (OSF Results)
    • Goal: Move beyond “off the shelf” solutions to customize and design novel experiments.
  • Beyond the web, JavaScript is a powerful multi-purpose language with many tools useful for psychological research.
    • Example: Data mining and sentiment analysis of Reddit content
  • Ubiquitous
    • Extending Qualtrics via API and embedded JavaScript

R & RStudio:

  • Popular in scientific computing
  • Analyze and graphically represent the data collected from our experiments
  • More flexible analysis and graphing than other standard statistical softwares such as SPSS or STATA
  • Free to use and platform independent
  • Community developed (continuous code advancements and bug fixes)
  • Easy to develop and share code for best Open Science practices

Commonalities:

  • Programming paradigms such as variables, conditionals, functions, etc. (which also overlap to other languages such as Python, Matlab, SQL, Java, etc.)
  • Free and accessible
  • Easy to get started with with yet extensible and capable for advanced tasks
  • Extensible
  • Useful for scripting and automation

Big picture theme

Programmer’s Mindset...

Course Logistics

Run through syllabus, course policies, deliverables, etc.