Cognitive Psy Students: Useful languages

[CarBob]

So the program that I will be starting has a focus in Visual Cognition. I think that most of our experiments are programmed using E-Prime but I was wondering if anyone could recommend any other useful languages? Is R still considered useful or have statistical softwares pretty much made it outdated?

 

 

Thanks

[Jay's Brain]

I would say Psychtoolbox and Matlab are very useful programming languages and tools to use. They allow for a lot of versatility and avoids the hassle of having multiple softwares to run behavioural experiments and data/statistical analyses.

[isilya]

Seconding Jay's Brain, most vision labs use Psychophysics Toolbox for MATLAB. Another thing that I see some people use for stim presentation is psychopy for Python. Python is pretty easy to pick up if you already know another language. R is amazing for statistical analysis, and it's the only thing I use for analyzing data. However, you should ask your advisor what they use, because if they only use, for example, SPSS, you should probably learn that instead of something else.

[rising_star]

This infographic is kind of fun: http://boingboing.net/2015/07/22/what-programming-language-shou.html

[juilletmercredi]

 Is R still considered useful or have statistical softwares pretty much made it outdated?

 

I don't understand the question - R is a statistical software package. And no, it's still tremendously useful. Most people in your program may use SPSS, but at least in my experience that doesn't mean that you have to use it especially if you want to do any advanced analysis - and it may benefit you if you can branch out. I stopped using SPSS and started using a combination of SAS and Stata in graduate school (and learned bit of R later), and it meant that I was the go-to person for analysis questions and started working as a stats consultant in grad school.

 

R is excellent because it's free and open source!

 

As for programming languages - well, I've been working on learning Python because when I look at job ads that are appealing to me, that's the programming language they ask for most often. Ruby will be my next project because that's the one I see second-most. Python is also easier to learn and very similar to the SAS and R language I already know, so it seemed like a good place to start.