; PSY 1903
PSY 1903 Programming for Psychologists

Project Details

Summary

By the end of a semester, you will complete a culminating project with one or two classmates that will include coding and conducting a psychological experiment, analyzing and visualizing data collected from that experiment, and presenting it to your classmates.

Checkpoints

The following checkpoints are due throughout the semester to help you in the development of this project. Your final project is worth 35% of your course grade, and the percentage distribution for each checkpoint is indicated below.

(7%) Draft 1 - Due Tue Oct 15 @ 1:00pm

  • You will complete a general experiment plan and outline. This checkpoint prepares you for the experiment workshop held in-class in Week 7 where you will begin coding your experiment.
  • Template and instructions for Draft 1…

(11%) Draft 2 - Due Mon Oct 28 11:59pm

  • You will wrap-up the coding of your experiment, adding on the ability to run the experiment publicly online and collect data via OSF.io. By the completion of this draft, you should be ready to share your experiment with others in Week 10.
  • Template and instructions for Draft 2...

(2%) Final data collection - Due Nov 11 @ 11:59pm

  • In Week 10, you will do in-class data collection where classmates will complete each other’s experiments. Outside of class, you will ask friends/family to complete your experiment. The resulting data from these collections is due at this checkpoint.

(11%) Data cleaning and analysis - Due Mon Dec 2 11:59pm

  • You will take the data file output by your experiment and begin to reformat and quality control it to prepare it for analysis. You will also run some simple analyses (ANOVA, follow-up t-tests, and/or correlations; we’ll help you select the appropriate ones!) to see what your experiment has revealed! (Note: there is no requirement that your results come out significantly)

(4%) Final presentations - Due Tue Dec 10 (Reading Week)

  • You will briefly present your experimental design and findings, including at least one data visualization, during our end of year final presentations and course celebration. Presentations will be approximately 10 minutes and accompanied by a slide presentation.

Experiment Outline

Your experiment will consist of 3 tasks:

  1. A priming or induction task
  2. A questionnaire task
  3. Either an Implicit Association Task or an Emotional Stroop Task

Task 1 - Priming or induction

Your priming/induction task should be designed to somehow influence or be related to the IAT or EST you design (see below).

For a priming task example, if you are doing a family/career and women/men IAT, you might ask participants to read a short story about a male or female (chosen randomly) scientist.

For an induction task example, if you are doing a calm/scary EST, you might ask the participant to watch a video with either calm or scary content (chosen randomly).

These are just examples - feel free to get creative!

Task 2. Questionnaire

Your questionnaire task should contain roughly 10 questions answered using a Likert scale via jsPsych’s survey-likert plugin. You should display all the questions at once on a single screen.

The questions should pull from a questionnaire that is related to the IAT or EST you design. E.g. If you are doing a family/career, women/men IAT, you might pull from the Gender Stereotypes Test.

Some resources for finding questionnaires:

Task 3. IAT or EST

Visit the following pages for guidelines on building your IAT or EST:

If you choose to do an IAT, you will come up with 4 categories you are interested in studying (e.g. family/career and women/men)

If you choose to do an EST, you will come up with 2 emotions you are interested in studying (e.g. calm/scary).

Results

See this spreadsheet to see what fields of data are expected in the .csv results of your experiment.

Notes:

  • Click the column headers for more details.
  • Column headers highlighted in yellow indicate data you will have to explicitly collect in your experiment. All other data is auto-collected by jsPsych.
  • These examples were generated with only 4 trials per block for the IAT/EST; your final experiment should have 36 trials per block.
  • IMPORTANT: To avoid bugs and streamline the data processing steps, you must use the same field names we’re using in this example data.
  • The order of your columns of data does not matter and does not have to match our example.