Matlab for the Behavioral Sciences: How to program your own experiment.

PSYCH 448 (undergrads) / 538 (graduate students)

Winter 2008

Suitable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates considering graduate school in the behavioral sciences

Description: This class will be a tutorial for programming techniques in Matlab that are particularly relevant to researchers in behavioral sciences. The class will give a researcher with no or little experience in programming the tools they need to design and program their own experiment, do basic analysis, and plot their results. For example, we will include classes on experimental design, stimulus presentation, experimental timing, graphical user interfaces, curve fitting, randomization techniques, basic statistics, and customized data plotting, debugging and code optimization techniques.

Almost all experiments in the behavioral sciences have a certain structure.
Some sort of stimulus is displayed, the subject makes some sort of response, a new stimulus is presented that may or may not depend on the subjects' response. At the end of the experiment the data needs to be saved and analyzed. This class will step through these various stages of a typical program. By the end of the class, the student will not only have the programming knowledge she needs to develop a working program, she will have already written several working programs typical of a wide variety of behavioral science experiments.

In each class, I will explain basic techniques and commands and provide code examples. Homeworks will practice and build on these skills. Optional homeworks will include more advanced topics and techniques. Each class will build on the core material of the class before.

The class is based on a book that Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton are writing, and the notes for the class is the manuscript draft for the book.


The EPOST discussion group is HERE

What is programming (print out and bring to class on 1/08/2008)
Matrices and Calculations (print out and bring to class on 1/08/2008 & 1/10/2008)
Basic graphics (print out and bring to class on 1/15/2008)
Making a gabor (print out and bring to class on 1/15/2008 & 1/17/2008)
FaceAdaptation1 (print out and bring to class on 1/17/2008).
You will also need the following image files: FaceImages.zip. Unzip and put the folders (morph, male and female) in the same directory as FaceAdaptation.m.
Functions (print out and bring to class on 1/22/2008)
Psychtoolbox (print out and bring to class on 1/24/2008)
FaceAdaptation with Psychtoolbox (print out and bring to class on 1/29/2008)
KeyPresses (print out and bring to class on 1/29/2008)
FinalFaceAdaptation (also see Homeworks)
Copy of working code -  FinalFaceCode.zip
Sound (print out and bring to class on 2/5/2008)
BasicPlotting (print out and bring to class on 2/7/2008)
MorePlotting (print out and bring to class on 2/7/2008)
You'll also need the following two functions:
logx2raw.m
logy2raw.m
DataInDataOut (print out and bring to class on 2/12/2008)
Also download these files and put them in the same directory as DataInDataOut
MiscFiles.zip
CosmoQuiz
Tracing a neuron and the actual m-files
CollateRats and the actual m-files
Calibration (print out and bring to class on 3/5/2008)
Fitting code from Geoff
Monte-Carlo (print out and bring to class on 3/11/2008)


Homeworks