JavaScript & R

Summary

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

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
- More demos here...
- 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

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

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