My name is Ben and I’m a self-taught programmer with no formal computer science training. A few years ago I gained the painful self-awareness that my scientific programming was shitty. I’m not saying it was wrong (I hope not) but it was just bad. I confused familiarity with my language of choice with proficiency. I had […]
Tag archives: software
matlab rant 2
So I just read this great rant about Matlab by Olivia Guest, and it reminded me to update my previous rant about Matlab, so here it is. For the record, I don’t disagree with anything Olivia said, and I’m not overly defending Matlab. I am trapped in its local minima and am slowly reaching escape velocity, moving over […]
new guest editorial piece out in Perception
A short viewpoint piece that Keith and I wrote just came out in Perception. Go check it out, it’s open access. May, K. A., & Vincent, B. T. (2016). Fewer Statistical Tests … or Better Ones? Perception. http://doi.org/10.1177/0301006616677909
A grammar of multi-panel scientific plots: initial thoughts
In common with many scientists, I have no formal training in computer science and my coding skills have been entirely self-taught. I’ve been coding for over a decade and a half, and I thought I was a relatively good programmer, but I had mistaken familiarity with expertise. And so recently I have been on a […]
Bayesian analysis toolbox for delay discounting, version 1.3
Posterior predictive checks The toolbox now calculates 2 measures of “goodness of fit” of the models. This is a useful quantitative reassurance that the models describe the participant discounting behaviour better than chance. In turn, this is important when we come to deciding which (if any) data files we should exclude. You can go and […]
Bayesian analysis toolbox for delay discounting, version 1.2
I’ve just released Version 1.2 of the toolbox ‘Bayesian analysis toolbox for delay discounting.’ The main feature of this release was the addition of new models. For example, you can now estimate discount rates (ignoring the magnitude effect). So you can obtain estimates of the discount rate k, which is very useful if your primary […]
Pimp your research code using UML class diagrams
Ideally, all research code should be made available at the point of submitting a paper. I’ve found that the way I write my research code has changed for the better now that I’ve made a commitment to making it open. However it can somewhat opaque and time consuming to understand, so how can we help those wanting to review, use, […]
Hierarchical Bayesian estimation and hypothesis testing for delay discounting tasks
I am happy to announce my 3rd paper of the year, accepted for publication in Behavior Research Methods. Following my initial foray into writing review papers (2 earlier this year), this is my first methods paper, and also my first contribution to higher-level decision making.
Cognitive modelling 3: the importance of a script
One of the key things we must avoid is mess and confusion. In the last post I briefly covered one possible template for a research project. One of the reasons why cognitive modelling projects might be a little tricky is because you are not just using an off the shelf software package. For example, if […]
Cognitive modelling 2: project structure
What we definitely want to do is avoid confusion and mess. Having a clear project structure and workflow has many advantages. While there is no one single correct way to organise a project, putting a bit of thought into it, and learning from past projects can help a lot. This is the workflow that works for […]
A tutorial on Bayesian models of perception
Vincent, B. T. (2015) A tutorial on Bayesian models of perception, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 66:103–114.
Cognitive modelling 1: programming problems
This is the first post in a series exploring programming practice in cognitive modelling. While I have over a decade of experience in cognitive modelling, I am in no way an expert and have no formal computer science training. I am not an authority on this, I am feeling my way. Comments welcome. This post may […]
Plotting posterior predictive distributions
I’ve just released a small bit of Matlab code on GitHub which helps automate the job of plotting posterior predictive distributions. If you are inferring posterior distributions of parameters of a 1D function (e.g. y=mx+c) then this code will plot the posterior predictive distribution for you. This should be handy for you to eyeball how well a model […]
Sate the urge to draw a graph: useful software
Sometimes one just has the urge to draw a graph, and to draw a graph quickly. This happens to me when I’m trying to convey basic ideas either in my teaching material or for the introduction of a talk, for example. In the past I have tried the approach of copy/paste from Google Images or by searching through my paper […]
Start coding. Do it.
This is not a fair, even-handed review of all possible languages for all purposes. The intended audience is undergraduate psychology students who cannot code. What is coding? Why learn to code? Excellent arguments are made in this person’s blog post “Why every (psychology) student should learn to code“. The main points are: If you want […]
Useful maths software
When you need to deliver a heavy payload of maths into a presentation, a figure, or a non-LaTeX document, then this tool is highly useful. LaTeXiT is a really nice, and free, piece of software for the mac that allows you to generate equations and import them into other documents in a whole bunch of […]