Practical: Excel for Scientists

Full course description

Modern experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience are inconceivable without computers to process numerical data. There are various spreadsheet programs that offer the necessary flexibility and are widely available. For the purpose of this course, students will be working with Excel. Some proficiency is very useful for displaying research results and calculating simple statistical parameters. In addition, several basic concepts from digital signal processing are clarified by the hands-on approach of conducting calculations. These calculations correspond with topics from the course ‘Methods and Paradigms’. Some examples of possibilities are How do you determine simple statistical parameters as an average or standard deviation? How do you calculate signal detection parameters and Beta? How is data transferred between statistical programs, such as SPSS? How do you create a publishable graph? The practical involves working through a manual under supervision.

The final assessment for this course is pass or fail - and not a numerical grade between 0,0 and 10,0.