Fall Semester 2013

MATLAB FOR BRAIN SCIENCES

HCS 6388.001

Meeting time:  Tuesday and Thursday 8:30 - 9:45 a.m.

Meeting Place:  JO 3.209

Instructor: Dr. Michael P. Kilgard
Office: JO 4.304    
Office hours: Wednesday 2-3 pm
Office phone: (972) 883-2339
E-mail address: kilgard@utdallas.edu

Course Description

    This course is designed to teach basic proficiency in Matlab programming. No prior programming experience is required. By the end of the course, students should be able to design a simple psychophysical experiment and write Matlab code to generate the appropriate stimuli, collect and organize behavioral results, perform basic statistical analyses, and generate publication quality figures to report the experimental results. This course will be useful to students interested in neuroscience, communication disorders, cognitive science, and psychology. The computer is the most powerful tool in science, but the incredible flexibility of the modern computer is only available to those with programming skills.

    Lectures will provide students with basic explanations of Matlab commands and syntax, but most learning will occur while programming in class and in simple homework assignments. The course will conclude with a student initiated project to develop a psychophysical experiment to test and report an interesting behavioral result.

 

Material Discussed

Concepts:

·         Variable and the Workspace

·         Matrices and Multiple dimensions

·         Matlab Editor

·         Error Messages

·         Stimulus Presentation (text, images, and sound)

·         Data collection (from simple reaction times measures to specialized equipment)

·         Debugging programs

·         Making Publication Quality Graphs

·         Statistical Analyses

·         Graphical User Interface

·         Signal processing (FFT and spectral analysis)

·         Neural Networks

·         Psychophysical Study Design

 

Course Requirements

    All assigned readings must be completed before each class.

Homework assignments – 25% of final grade.

           

In class assignments – 25% of final grade.

           

Individual project – 50% of final grade

 

Objectives
        On completion of this course, students should be able to:

 

Required Text:    Matlab for Behavioral Scientists (Code from the textbook is at the following link).

Students must have a copy of Matlab for homework assignments.

 

 Any schedule changes will be posted at:  www.utdallas.edu/~kilgard/MatlabFALL13.htm 

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