Students, researchers, and professors often say they wished they had the opportunity to take courses that helped them to acquire the actual skills needed for research. I decided to develop a class to serve this purpose: This is a new course aimed at upper division undergraduate and graduate students in the behavioral sciences (cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and related fields). The goal is to help students learn how to use Matlab and the Psychophysics Toolbox (PsychToolbox).
Matlab is a programming platform used widely in a variety settings both in academia and industry. PsychToolbox is a free set of programs that makes it easier to develop experiments using Matlab.
UPDATE: The course is being offered Fall 2011. Enrollment limit is 30 students max (due to lab size).
A note on prerequisites:
If you've taken COGS 109, 118a or 118b, you can go ahead and enroll. If not, the prerequisites are:
- An introductory programming course (e.g., CSE 5, 8a+8b, 11, 12, MAE 9, or equivalent)
- Basic college level math (Minimum of MATH 10, or equivalent; Linear algebra highly recommended)
- A basic statistics course (COGS 14, PSYCH 60, or equivalent)
- or Consent of professor: If you can't enroll, please email me with a list of Math and programming-related coursework.
ABOUT THIS COURSE:
This is an applied, hands-on class. The goal is to develop skills that you can see and use. Our focus will be on using Matlab to design, run, and analyze behavioral experiments. At the end of the class, you will not only have learned how to program an experiment, you will also have developed a set of programs that you can adapt to new purposes in the future. You will also feel more confident in your ability to program computers. The skills you will acquire in this course can make you more competitive for research assistantships, fellowships, and internships. You can also become a more attractive candidate for graduate school, academic, and industry jobs in a range of fields. More broadly, Matlab is used in so many settings that there is a very high probability that you will benefit from learning it.
The course will not "teach" you how to program and develop an experiment. Rather, the class will enable you to acquire these skills. You can think of us like a coach, personal trainer, or piano teacher. We will provide information, support, motivation, structure, and guidance. Over the quarter, incrementally, you will acquire valuable skills you can use at school and beyond. And then we will all feel proud of you!
What kinds of things can be done with Matlab? Below is a video I made from an experiment I programmed using Matlab and the Psychophysics Toolbox. The visual stimuli are made from point-light biological motion. The visual stimuli were used in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment we ran here at UCSD. The song is "It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls, and it was added just for fun (and was not part of the experiment). The details of this experiment have been described in detail in our paper in Cerebral Cortex, which you don't have to read, but can have a look if you're wondering how we used these stimuli to study vision and attention in the human brain. The main point here is to show you an example of what can be done with Matlab and Psychtoolbox, the tools you will learn in this class.
By the end of the class, you too will be able to program your own raining men or women or cats or dogs, more importantly, your own experiments. Previous years' students produced programs that were applicable to many domains, from the study of rodent navigation, to the analysis of physiological responses related to empathy when we see others in pain. There is even a competition for best project, where you vote for the winning team.