Introduction

About the material

This material is free to use and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives V4.0 International License.

About the seminar

This is a material for Python for social and experimental psychology seminar. Each chapter covers a single seminar, introducing necessary ideas and is accompanied by a notebook with exercises that you need to complete and submit. The material assumes no foreknowledge of Python or programming from the reader. Its purpose is to gradually build up your knowledge and allow you to create more and more complex games. Yes, games! Of course, the real research is about performing experiments but there is little difference between the two. The basic ingredients are the same and, arguably, experiments are just boring games. And, be assured, if you can program a game, you certainly can program an experiment.

We will start with a simple Guess a Number text-only game in which first you and then the computer will be doing the guessing. Next, we will implement a classic Hunt the Wumpus text adventure game that will require use of more complex structures. Once we master the basics, we will up the ante by making video games with graphics and sounds using PsychoPy library. We will start with a classic Memory Game and, then, create a more dynamic game by making a clone of a Flappy Bird.

Remember that throughout the seminar you can and should(!) always ask me whenever something is unclear or you do not understand a concept or logic behind certain code. Do not hesitate to write me in the team or (better) directly to me in the chat (in the latter case, the notifications are harder miss and we don’t spam others with our conversation).

You will need to submit your assignment one day before the next seminar (Tuesday before noon at the latest), so I would have time evaluate it and provide feedback.

As a final assignment, you will need to program a video game, which will only require the material covered by the seminar. Please inform me, If you require a grade, as then I will create a more specific description for you to have a clear understanding of how the program will be graded.

Note on exercises

In many exercises your will be not writing the code but reading and understanding it. Your job in this case is “to think like a computer”. Your advantage is that computers are very dumb, so instructions for them must be written in very simple, clear, and unambiguous way. This means that, with practice, reading code is easy for a human (well, reading a well-written code is easy, you will eventually encounter “spaghetti-code” which is easier to rewrite from scratch than to understand). In each case, you simply go line-by-line, doing all computations by hand and writing down values stored in the variables (if there are too many to keep track of). Once you go through code in this manner, it will be completely transparent for you. No mysteries should remain, you should have no doubts or uncertainty about any(!) line. Moreover, then you can run the code and check that the values you are getting from computer match yours. Any difference means you made a mistake and code is working differently from how you think it does. In any case, if you not 100% sure about any line of code, ask me, so we can go through it together!

In a sense, reading the code is the most important programming skill. It is impossible to learn how to write, if you cannot read first! Moreover, when programming you will probably spend more time reading the code and making sure that it works correctly than writing the new code. Thus, use this opportunity to practice and never use the code that you do not understand completely. This means that you certainly can use stackoverflow but do make sure you understand the code you copied!

Why Python?

The ultimate goal of this seminar is to teach you how to create an experiment for psychology research. There are many ways to achieve this end. You can use drag-and-drop systems either commercial like Presentation, Experiment Builder or free like PsychoPy Bulder interface. They have a much shallower learning curve, so you can start creating and running your experiments faster. However, the simplicity of their use has a price: They are fairly limited in which stimuli you can use and how you can control the presentation schedule, conditions, feedback, etc. Typically, they allow you to extend them by programming the desired behavior but you do need to know how to program to do this. Thus, I think that while these systems, in particular PsychoPy, are great tools to quickly bang a simple experiment together, they are most useful if you understand how they create the underlying code and how you would program it yourself. Then, you will not be limited by the software, as you know you can program something the default drag-and-drop won’t allow, but you can always opt in, if drag-and-drop is sufficient but faster. At the end, it is about having options and creative freedom to program an experiment that will answer your research question, not an experiment that your software allows you to program.

We will learn programming in Python, which is a great language that combines simple and clear syntax with power and ability to tackle almost any problem. The advantage of learning Python, as compared to say Matlab, which is commonly used in neuroscience, is that it allows you do almost anything. In this seminar, we will concentrate on desktop experiments but you can use it for online experiments (oTree), scientific programming (NumPy and SciPy), data analysis (pandas), machine learning (keras), website programming (django), computer vision (OpenCV), etc. Thus, learning Python will give you one of the most versitile programming tools that you can use for all stages of your research or work. And, Python is free, so you do not need to worry whether you or your future employer will be able to afford the license fees (a very real problem, if you use Matlab).