Coding Experience in Cognitive Psychology

[CogPsych97]

Hi,

How much coding experience do you need before attending graduate school? I would like to get a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology using behavioral and computational methods to study various aspects of cognition. I understand that some programs focus more heavily on computational methods over behavioral, and vice versa; I wanted to know how much they expect you to know when applying. I have taken basic courses in MATLAB and Python, and a statistics class in R. How much more in depth do they expect psychology majors to be when applying to these types of programs?

Thank you for your advice. 

[loffire]

I think it depends on the methods the labs youre applying to tend to use. If the POI uses a sh*t ton of programming and computational stuff then you might need more. Best would be to email the POI and discuss fit (include your email detailing things you've down with your programing knowledge i.e. program an experiment. I emailed a POI who does social neuroscience with lots of computational stuff and he replied " It's great that you have some programming experience - that's a huge part of my lab."  I think as long as you have some knowledge, it's an indicator that you can pick up heavier stuff.

[ResilientDreams]

It also might not matter if you don't have all the necessary programming skills right away. The professor I talked to for my Skype interview was VERY into computational modeling (more so than I had thought at first--I'm more of an experimental person). I made a point to emphasize to him several times that I don't have computational modeling experience and he basically said it didn't matter, most people with a psychology background don't.

[PsychApplicantFall2019]

My work uses a lot of computational methods as well, and I think that your experience will be a great fit for many groups. I do think many PIs have the expectation that you have some experience with MATLAB/Python/R/Unix, and it sounds like you would fit that very well. There is a chance that particular groups may typically take students with a very strong CS or applied math background, but you should be able to find that out by looking at the lab website or talking to the PI.