02455 Experiment in Cognitive Science

Rapporteur: Ivana Konvalinka

Type of assessment: Group oral examination and individualized group report with a page limit. 60% oral exam, 40% report

Exam duration: Oral exam: 30 minutes

Aid: Presentation slides
Evaluation: 7 step scale, external examiner

General course objectives

Experimentation in cognitive science is a young field, and many mysteries remain about human behaviour, perception, and performance. With the ever-growing amount of human data available, and development of data science and artificial intelligence, it is a crucial timefor understanding how to collect, handle, and interpret human data.

This course will teach engineering students how to formulate research questions and testable hypotheses in cognitive science, use them to design and carry out an appropriate experiment by collecting behavioural and/or physiological data from human participants, and interpret the results of their experiments in the context of a wider research question within cognitive science.

Experiments will be conducted at the CogSys behavioural lab, in the classroom, or online in groups of 2-3. The course is limited to 50 students.

Learning objectives

  • Describe ethical considerations when conducting experiments with human participants
  • Describe different behavioural (i.e. reaction time, eye-tracking) and physiological (i.e. heart rate, HRV) measures in cognitive science, and how they can inform human cognition
  • Use AI to zoom into a research field of interest, within the field of cognitive science
  • Find, assess, and review relevant literature in the chosen field of cognitive science
  • Formulate a research question and testable hypothesis in cognitive science
  • Design an experiment in cognitive science to test a given hypothesis
  • Perform an experiment to test the hypothesis by collecting behavioural or physiological data from human participants
  • Analyze the experiment by pre-processing the data and applying appropriate statistical models
  • Report the results of the experiment, and interpret them in the context of a wider research area

Content

This course introduces experimentation in cognitive science, and teaches engineering students how to collect, handle, and interpret human data in an ethically considerate manner.

Core elements

  • Ethics and data handling in experimentation with human participants
  • Behavioural and physiological measures in cognitive science
  • Experimental design and analysis principles in cognitive science

Course literature

Textbook + research papers