COGS 219: Programming for Behavioral Sciences

Welcome to COGS 219!

This course is targeted at PhD students in the cognitive and behavioral sciences and will introduce you to state-of-the-art “tools of the trade” for doing experimental work. The course will provide a hands-on introduction to modern tools for conducting experiments and working with data. This course is ideal for students who are interested in developing skills in experimental research and building their data science toolkit. In short, we will cover things that I wish someone had taught me when I was starting out in graduate school.

Here are some things this class is designed to do:

• Teach basic programming in the context of experimental psychological research and behavioral data science

• Teach data-wrangling skills in R’s tidyverse environment

• Write clean code that’s understandable to others

• Improve your problem solving and debugging skills

• Give you the confidence to learn more on your own

And a few things that it’s not designed to do:

• Teach software engineering

• Teach computer science theory (though we will take a few dips into it, as necessary)

• Teach low-level aspects of programming, e.g., memory management

• Teach a full course on statistics or machine learning (while we will touch on some of these topics, these are covered in other classes)