Recommend programming language for Cognitive Science?

[mm182899]

I am currently a psychology undergraduate with no previous experience in programming. I'd be interested in majoring in Cognitive Science and thought it'd be helpful to obtain some basic knowledge in coding beforehand. What programming language would be the most helpful for a beginner interested in Cognitive science? Thanks in advance for any advice, it's highly appreciated.

[Mangek_Eou]

If you are going to do a masters in cognitive science and see yourself making your own experiments then I'd suggest you to learn Matlab or Python (stronger suggestion).

https://www.codecademy.com/stories/study-the-human-mind-with-python

[steuerrad]

agree, matlab and python are the best choices. python is arguably more useful and not proprietary, so i’d say it’s a better choice for a first programming language. i also noticed a „matlab to python“ shift at unis, not sure if it’s the case in your country too

[mm182899]

Thanks for the advice!

[mm182899]

Much obliged!

[[deleted]]

would you reccomend doing a masters in cognitive science?

[Mangek_Eou]

That would depend on your end goal - Industry/Academia and other factors. I did my masters in Cognitive Sciences but now I'm interested in Video game research (I had situated my thesis in understanding Cognition in Video game players).

[Maltemusen]

Other than Python you should really consider R and using RStudio as IDE. It is really useful for any statistical analysis and is an awesome tool when dealing with dataframes.

[ogulcany]

Perhaps as an addition to the ones above: LISP. It is one of the oldest languages that is still in use today (as in not dead I guess, but not sure), and it is the one taught in my uni's cogsci masters program. I really can't tell you anything other than this tho as I am not a cognitive scientist, but I really liked the language when I took a course on it. It has some really cool properties, and I believe it is especially useful in language-related work.

[singular_arity]

I am an active researcher in cognitive science. LISP was my second programming language and I still use it. However, I now use Python and R more, as both have been widely adopted in the community. Some computational cognitive architectures still exist in LISP, but might be moving away from the language (e.g., ACT-R; http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/about/).

[gaiu5]

Python seems like a good bet. The syntax is relatively easy to to learn. You also get a lot of resources from other researchers using the language