Real Analysis of Data in Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour

RAD in PNB!

Welcome to RAD in PNB! This is an open electronic resource that is designed to aid you on your journey in understanding statistics for a variety of different psychological disciplines using simulated data based on real research. After all, a fundamental aspect of research in psychology is statistical literacy.

You might have noticed that undergraduate psychology programs almost always include at least one course on using statistics in psychological research and, perhaps to your dismay, your instructor may require you to use the statistical software R to do your assignments and tests. You probably would not be surprised to hear that meaningful learning of R is not easy (or at least it is not as easy as we would like) for many students. This can have direct impacts on students being unable to apply their statistical knowledge from the course to future research opportunities. As the instructors for statistics and other psychology courses, and a combined instructing experience of over 8 years now, we certainly recognize that there is a disconnect between what happens in our classes and the way students use (or DON’T use) statistics in later research opportunities.

But FEAR NOT!

That is where this RAD in PNB open-educational resource comes in!

Meet the Team!

Here, we have worked with an interdisciplinary group of graduate students from the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University to create a rich set of research scenarios, datasets, analysis plans, practice questions, and R scripts that are directly related to recent and/or ongoing research being conducted by the faculty members whose labs you are likely to join in the coming year or two! These graduate students and content creators are becoming experts in their fields in no small part from a thorough understanding of statistics as well as a deep mastery over R.

Contributing content to the chapters on psychological statistics are Sevda Montakhaby Nodeh and Carmen Tu. In these chapters you will find questions on many psychological phenomena like perception, attention, cognition, memory, development, narrative, music, and social perceptions. Contributing content to the chapters on statistics related to neuroscience are Matin Yousefbadi and Maheshwar Panday. In these chapters you will find questions focused on understanding electroencephalograms (EEGs), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), as well as key aspects of data wrangling and managing high dimensional datasets. Finally, contributing content to the chapters on behavioural and animal behavioural research and statistics are Brendan McEwan and Sina Zarini. In these chapters you will find questions on a variety of different animal species including bedbugs, flies, frogs, lizards, and fish. We honestly could not have found a more RAD team or made this open electronic resource without their dedication and fantastic contributions!

Main Take-Aways.

We hope you can use this OER to…

1. Get a sense of current research going on in the department’s various research labs.

2. Get an idea of the analysis pipeline used in a typical study from a research lab you are interested in.

3. Practice and prepare for analyzing your data from your thesis/independent project.

4. Practice for your statistics courses using real data!

Not From Mac? No Worries!

If you’ve found yourself here from outside of the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University, you can still benefit from the diversity of research questions and analysis techniques presented here. The universality of statistics makes this OER relevant for virtually any background you come here with. So take a look because, after all, a fundamental aspect of research in psychology is statistical literacy.

A Few More Remarks…

Before you get started, we want to share a few remarks about this OER. First, this is the first edition and therefore is not meant to exhaustively cover the research in PNB. We do, however, hope that as the years pass, more and more work is added to fully capture the recent and ongoing work going on and in the department. Second, you can get involved with this OER! As you complete studies in your undergraduate or graduate career, we invite you to submit a representative summary of your research, data, and analysis. This is already often done with open-access research publications, so it is not a big step to transform it into an educational resource. We (Ali & Matt) or someone on the team, will be more than happy to be involved in the process of incorporating your work. In this way, this OER will always be up-to-date with recent works. And thirdly, explore this OER with an open mind. You will notice significant variation between different research fields. You will find that in different fields — and even within fields — different researchers prefer different visualization techniques. We provide a sample of what can be done, and hope it sparks enough interest in you that you can find the visualization and analysis techniques that answer your questions best.

So, have fun and stay RAD!

– Ali & Matt