Welcome to the lab!

Research can be fun, but it can also be quite stressful at times. Our lab is very much like a small business. We receive funding from external agencies like the National Institutes of Health with the promise to produce peer-reviewed scientific papers. The kind of work we do tends to be pretty complicated, and it requires a lot of teamwork. When you start in the lab, you will quickly become an integral member of a small team dedicated to one or more projects. When you start with us, your first few months will often involve learning to code data, program experiments, and run the eyetracker. At this stage in your research career, it is very important that you be meticulous and reliable. As you learn more, you will eventually develop your own projects and analyze your own data.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, it is also important to know that the way we do research is much like any other specialized trade. There are nuts and bolts skills you must gain and build upon as you grow as a researcher. Before you can do anything, it is very important that you have a firm understanding of responsible conduct in research — protecting confidentiality and learning how research protocols are approved through Institutional Review Boards. You may be tempted to “goo” someone and go gonzo trying out a new tDCS protocol, but there are procedures in place before this can be done.

Within your first few weeks in the lab, you should complete the following:

CITI human subjects training

  • CITI Basic Course in the Protection of Human Subjects Research (specific module below)

    • Social & Behavioral Research Investigators 

  • Practice Runs Training

commonly used software packages 

  • E-Prime

    • We use this program to present stimuli, record demographics, and log response accuracies and latencies. Complete the tutorial first. Then program your own simple experiment. See Jamie for guidelines.

  • R

    • R is an exceptionally powerful statistical program that does beautiful plotting. Its functions are command line, so there is a steep learning curve. The miracle of R is that it is free. Complete the R CodeSchool tutorial. and the GGPlot tutorial.

  • Excel

    • I know that people rip on Microsoft, but Excel is a workhorse of a program. We use it all the time. Learn the following functions: rand, concatenate, basic averaging, if/then conditional statements, cell anchoring, and macros.

  • Audacity

    • You are working in a speech and language lab. Did you think it would be possible to survive without learning how to operate a waveform editor?

  • Adobe Photoshop & illustrator

    • Your days of creating figures in Powerpoint are over.

Literature searches and citation software

  • PubMed & Google Scholar

    • The most common databases we use are PubMed & Google Scholar.

  • Zotero

    • Free reference software. We use this ALL the time.