1.5 Data sets covered

Data analysis can be quite varied because data itself can be quite varied. We try to present some variation, but since this is an introductory course with lots of other ground to cover, we will be slightly conservative in the kind of data that we analyze. The focus is on data from behavioral experiments (like categorical choices or reaction times). There will be no analyses specifically tailored to pictures, sounds, dates or time sequences in this course. Appendix D gives an overview of the most important, recurring data sets used in this course.

Most of the data sets that we will use repeatedly in this class come from various psychological experiments. To make this even more immersive, these experiments are implemented as browser-based experiments, using _magpie. This makes it possible for students of this course to actually conduct the exact experiments whose data the book will analyze (and maybe generate some more intuitions and some hypotheses).

More on data sets used in this book is provided in Appendix D.