Course Introduction
The following is an outline of what will be covered in class 1.
Introductions
- Susan Buck (susanbuck@fas.harvard.edu)
- Garth Coombs (garthcoombs@fas.harvard.edu)
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
Course Logistics
Run through syllabus, course policies, deliverables, etc.