- The aim of the course is to give students basic knowledge on how to design experiments involving human research subjects, starting from formulating testable hypotheses, designing experiments that can test them, and up to analyzing and interpreting results. Topics will include an overview of different research protocols and methods, and basic data analyses approaches.
Requirements: Attendance and active participation, during the semester students will design an experiment, individually or in small groups, and will pilot them. During the course students will present their suggested study, and at the end of the course each student or group will give a 15 minutes presentation explaining the rational of the study, methods selection considerations, and the analysis of preliminary results. Following each presentation, we will have a short open discussion in class suggesting possible modifications or follow-up experiments.
Topics:
- Hypothesis formulation – the basis of scientific research.
- Experimental designs – topics will include: within subject designs, between subject designs, lab experiments, observational studies, questionnaires, and more.
- Approaches to the evaluation of participants’ behavior – different measures that can be used and what each can (and cannot) reveal about the brain and human behavior. We will learn how to estimate psychophysical thresholds, sensitivity, and confidence.
- Experiment building platforms – two widely used platforms for building and running experiments will be introduced, PsychToolBox which is a set of functions for running experiments in Matlab, and Amazon Mechanical Turk an online web-based platform that can be used to perform research.
- Drawing conclusions from successful and failed experiments, and designing follow-up and replication studies.
- Critical and constructive thinking – learning how to evaluate the work of peers and colleagues in a productive way.
- Ethical requirements and guidelines for conducting behavioral research.