BCSC 511: Behavioral Methods in Cognitive Science

Offered: Spring (biennial)

This course will cover a variety of behavioral techniques and analyses, with the goal of developing technical and analytical skills in thinking about experimental psychology. After several classes to introduce behavioral research and experimentation, we will focus on three prior experiments in detail: time series data from language comprehension, psychophysics, and animal behavior.

Tools: Work will use a variety of free/open/replicable analysis tools in R and RStudio, including:

• Version control, backup, and data sharing: github and RStudio integration
• Data wrangling: tidyverse, magrittr, dplyr, broom, purrr
• Data visualization: ggplot2, plotly
• Data and code documentation: R markdown (good coding: styler, lintr, assertthat, here)
• Setting up code for reuse and sharing (devtools, roxygen2)
• Data analysis: lme4, lmerTest, gamm4
• Data and model tables: stargazer, sjPlot
• Optionally Bayesian data analysis: brms (requires rstan, stan, and c-compiler to be installed)