Time and Location

Fall 2022: Monday & Wednesday, 9:35am – 11:30am, Psychology Building 0191

Description and Goals

This lab provides hands-on experience in the methods and approaches of perceptual psychophysics. Students in this class will learn and apply methods of scientific communication, summarize results, do lab write-ups, present data, and write a final paper. Activities in the lab will challenge students to think carefully and critically about every aspect of the research process, relating these to benefits and limitations of the scientific method in psychological research. After completing a progression of small assignments involving data care, students conduct instructor-supervised group projects to run an experiment of their own. Students will collect, analyze, and present the results of behavioral data collected from psychological experiments. In the end, students will judge similarities and differences between the methods and results of their own experiments.

By the end of the this semester, students will be able to:

• Program experiments and analyze data in MATLAB.
• Learn how research paradigms relate to the gaps in knowledge we seek to fill.
• Understand how experiments work.
• Learn how to use and summarize experiment data in an open and reproducible way.
• Become proficient in communicating research methods and findings.