Course overview and introduction

PSYC 11: Laboratory in Psychological Science

Jeremy R. Manning
Dartmouth College
Spring 2026

Who am I?

Jeremy R. Manning, Ph.D.

Associate Professor | Psychological & Brain Sciences | | Moore 349

context-lab.com
ContextLab

Research focus

How do our brains support our ongoing conscious thoughts, and how (and what) do we remember?

Key areas

Learning and memory, education technology, brain network dynamics, data science, NLP

Approach

Theory, models, experiments, neuroimaging

Training

B.S., Neuroscience & Computer Science
Ph.D., Neuroscience
Postdoc, Computer Science & Neuroscience

Funding & collaborators

NIH NSF DARPA BrainFit
Intel Labs Meta Google Amazon

Who are the other people in front of the room?

  • Yifan Fang
  • Yuqi Zhang
  • Eunhye Choe

TAs will lead breakout lab sections, hold weekly office hours, help with your labs and projects, and assist with grading assignments. Get to know them—they can be a fantastic resource; please take advantage of their expertise and support!

TAs are not responsible for course logistics, policies, content, or other administrative matters or interpersonal issues. Final grading decisions are made by me. Please reach out to me directly with any questions or concerns about any of these topics.

What is this course about?

  • Learn to carry out psychological research by doing it
  • Each lab maps to a section of a scientific article: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion
  • First ~5 weeks: guided labs. Last ~5 weeks: your own study!
  • How do we turn curiosity into a testable hypothesis?
  • How can we turn a hypothesis into a rigorous experiment?
  • What makes evidence convincing (or misleading)?
  • How do we communicate science clearly and honestly?

Logistics (the short version)

Course webpage

Slack

Discussion: what do you want to know?

  • What is one question about human behavior or the mind that you find genuinely interesting?
  • Share with a neighbor: do your questions overlap? How are they different?

Psychology of Everyday Life survey lab!

  • Gentle introduction to asking questions in a scientific way
  • You'll fill out a short survey about your everyday habits and attitudes (sleep, stress, screen time, happiness...)
  • Then we'll use this data to practice formulating and testing hypotheses
  • What's the difference between a "feeling" you have versus a testable scientific claim?
  • If you found that students who slept more were happier, what would you actually have learned? What wouldn't you know?
  • How might you design a study to distinguish correlation from causation?
  • Can you think of a question about human behavior that can't be studied scientifically? Why not?

Let's collect some data (in breakout groups)!

  • Read the lab instructions and fill out the survey form (both linked below and via QR codes)
  • Brainstorm some questions and hypotheses you could ask/test with this dataset

Lab instructions

Survey form

Questions? Want to chat more?

📧 Email me
💬 Join our Slack
💁 Come to office hours
  • Today: collect data and form hypotheses
  • Wednesday: turning hypotheses into specific statistical tests
  • X-hour and Friday: I'll be away (no class). But we will use some of the X-hours (including next week!) to make up missed classes when I'll be traveling and for Memorial Day.