Welcome to the team! 🎉 Whether you're a student, an intern or a colleague, joining a new work environment can be a bit stressful. In order to ease your first days and set you up for the future, we compiled this guide and hope that you will find it useful (though keep in mind that it's in a work-in-progress state).
The goal of this document is first and foremost to help you acquire the same frame of reference, so you can then understand what we are talking about, the issues that we face and the solutions that we find. However, it is possible that some of the advice or things here might at first seem weird or useless. Trust us though, it will probably become handy some day 😉
This guide has been crafted by all past and current members of the team. It's our collective legacy, and it will be yours too. As such, by the end of your journey here, we hope that you will leave your mark in this document, by updating / improving / revising some of its content. Don't worry, you will see how to do that later.
I feel a bit lost
Send us a message, we're likely unaware of that!
I'm not sure what I should do and what my tasks are
Send us a message, we're likely unaware of that!
There's too much work for me
Send us a message, we're likely unaware of that!
There's not enough work for me
Send us a message, we're likely unaware of that!
In short, for any reason, do not hestitate to drop us a message! Communication is key. Otherwise any unadressed issue can build up and create unnecessary stress or problems.
I sent a message but nobody answered...
Send us a reminder (after a reasonable time). There's usually a lot going on so it happens that we miss or skip things. It's not against you, and we'll be thankful that you reminded us.
Our team in centred around core values such as teamwork, continuous learning, friendly environment and aiming for the top.
We rely on a lot of internal communication (about stuff more - or less - related to work 😁), our ability to keep on learning and improving, a cool working environment (forget the formalities, ain't nobody got time for that!) and striving for the highest standards in terms of sciencific quality and honesty. We're strongly committed to open-science, i.e., working open by sharing our code, documentation, data and expertise.
On a more abstract level, I believe in what I call the three-fold neuropsychology skill set. In short, I think that a neuropsychologist (and, by extension, people working on-related topics - which is sort of all that we do) should aim (when applicable) at developping 3 types of expertise: clinical abilities (neuro/psycho-pathology, assessment, therapy & rehabilitation, ...), technical skills (statistics, programming, neuroimaging, signal processsing, ...) and theoretical knowledge (a diversified knowledge and understanding of the psychological and neuroscientific theories, frameworks and their history).
Note: this roadmap is typically something that has to be updated by the team, it's our collective responsibility. So if you notice that it's outdated, do make a Pull Request (see below if you don't know what it is) to update it!
Here are the projects that our team is currently working on:
- EEG and related stuff
- Physio processing and related stuff
- Cognitive Control and all the above
- Deception stuff
- REBEL stuff: reality monitoring, fiction and fake news
- NICE project (w/ Panos)
- Other (illusions, methods, sotftware, etc.)
Alright, here's the big day! First, take the time to settle in your space. Pay a visit to your colleagues, introduce yourself, explore the building, locate the offices, find the toilets and the coffee machine.
Do whatever is required on the admin side, complete the ethical certification, the mandatory trainings, etc. Specifically at NTU, this often involves completing short courses online:
- CITI Certification (on ethics and integrity in research)
- WorkDay mandatory courses (if you are an employee) that pop up from time to time
We believe that the best way to start this journey is to get out there, listen to the ongoing discourses and get publicly engaged. And Twitter is a good platform to do it 😉 Many researchers use it to share and summarize their new studies and projects, recruit participants or advertise positions. So you can easily keep up with the latest scientific news here. If you don't believe us, check-out this book about Twitter for researchers.
After creating an account, you can start by your colleagues:
We have compiled a list of interesting accounts, covering all sorts of different topics (but always somewhat relevant to what we do). You can follow this list and pin it to quickly access it from your timeline (don't forget to make suggestions to update this list). You can then start following yourself the people that you like.
- Reality Bending Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1509796111724134401
At first, you'll likely have to force yourself a bit to open and check twitter from time to time (to make it easier, set it as favourite and download the app). It's normal. But don't worry, once their machine learning algorithm gets a grip of what you like, it will start to be filled with interesting content.
ResearchGate is a professional networking site for scientists and researchers to share, discover and discuss research. (It's like a researchers' version of LinkedIn). You can see what kinds of projects others are currently working on, and their past manuscripts and publications. You can also post and answer questions, as well as recommend certain works! So create an account and start following us and the researchers you like.
GitHubWhether you're a beginner to programming or an expert, integrating into this community means you'll be constantly learning. GitHub is a place where projects are shared openly and transparently, and you can simply watch any repository you're interested in to receive notifications of relevant updates.
- You can start by reading this post: Why psychologists should join GitHub
We are using GitHub a lot for a lot of stuff (like pretty much for everything), and therefore you'll need to become familiar with it. First off, let's start with 1) Creating an account for you (advice: do use a simple login like FirstnameSurname rather than something you might regret later 😬), 2) Watch this repo (by selecting Watching on the watch button in the top-right corner) so you'll get notified of updates, 3) star 🌟 it and 4) start using it as follows:
- Create a new issue in this repo
- Select the Introduce myself template
- Answer the questions
- post it (we'll close it afterwards)
- Follow us (hit the follow button on the top right corner):
- @RealityBending
- @ClinicalBrainLab
- @DominiqueMakowski
- @anshu-97
- [@stephaniekirk] (https://github.com/stephaniekirk)
- YOU
- Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
- The Art of Thinking Clearly (Rolf Dobelli)
- ...
Here are some of our key papers that you can read.
- Phenomenal, bodily and brain correlates of fictional reappraisal as an implicit emotion regulation strategy
- "Being there" and remembering it: Presence improves memory encoding
- Heart Rate Variability in Psychology: A Review of HRV Indices and an Analysis Tutorial
- The heart of cognitive control: Cardiac phase modulates processing speed and inhibition
- You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them | Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality
- ...
- Mindhunter (TV show)
- Fractured
- Joker
- ...
Now that you have GitHub account, we need to set your authorizations to the various repositories that we have. Once you have been "set", you should be able to see this page here. If the link doesn't work, please send us a message to remind us to update your accesss level.
As said earlier, we use GitHub a lot, so it's a pre-requisite that you acquire this skill. However, it's quite tricky to get familiar and comfortable with it (even we struggle sometimes), and I'd say it's one of the most complicated thing you'll have to learn. But you cannot learn if you don't try, break things and succeed.
- Make a PR in this document here
The first task is to create a Pull Request (PR) to modify this very page. Go to the README page file and hit the "Fork and edit" button (the pen icon at the top right corner). Under the hoold, this will create a fork of the Onboarding account under your repo. You can then edit the file. For example, you can add your twitter and GitHub handle in the "lab members" list in the sections above (above the "You" placeholder). Then, propose the change and see what happens.
- To Read: markdown introduction
- Create your own first repo
Now, create your first repository! You can leave it mostly empty for now, it's just an experiment ground
- Setting up your profile on the Clinical Braib Lab website
The next task is to set-up your profile on the lab website.
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Step 1: Fork the website repository
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Go to the (Github Page Repository of Clinical Brain Lab)[https://github.com/ClinicalBrainLab/clinicalbrainlab.github.io]
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Hit the fork button at the top right corner to make a copy of the repository in your Github account.
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After a few minutes of waiting, you should now see a repository with a name of
your-username/clinicalbrainlab.github.io.
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Step 2: Add your profile to the website
- In your newly copied repository, navigate to the folder
your-username/clinicalbrainlab.github.io/content. This is where all the concent of the website is stored. - Can you guess which file is the one storing the profiles of our lab members? By intuition or by try-and-error, you should now click on the file
peoplefolder and look for the .Rmd file that you belong to (e.g. Research Fellows, Undergraduate Student etc). The extension .Rmd stands for markdown (or more specifically R markdown here). Don't worry too much if you are not familiar with the term. Read on! - By reading through the
.Rmdfile, you can see that it's just like any another word document (except more powerful ^^). The "#" is used to create the sections. You should now click on the pencil symbol at the top of the document to start editing. - If you can't find a .Rmd file in the
peoplefolder that accurately captures your role in the lab, do not hesitate to create a new one! - Now, you can simply look at what is being written under the name of other members, copy it, and customize the section to make it yours!
- In your newly copied repository, navigate to the folder
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Step 3: Add your profile picture
- The very last step for you to customize your profile is to add a picture of yourself. Did you see this strange-looking line
<img src="/img/someone-name.jpg" alt="someone-name" width="25%" align="left" hspace=20" vspace="20"><br />? This line helps to add your picture to your profile. - Look for that one picture of yourself that you look the most amazing and upload it to the
your-username/clinicalbrainlab.github.io/static/imgfolder. You can name the file with a simple name e.g. your-name 😊 - Go back to the
people.Rmdfile and in that strange-looking line, replacesomeone-name.jpgwith the name of your picture file and its extension. So that it knows where to look for your picture.
- The very last step for you to customize your profile is to add a picture of yourself. Did you see this strange-looking line
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Step 4: Make a Pull Request
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You are almost finished! Go back to
your-username/clinicalbrainlab.github.iomain page to look for the Pull Rquest sign. Click on it.
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The page will show that you are trying to make a Pull Request from your repositorty "your-username/clinicalbrainlab.github.io" to the original repository clinicalbrainlab/clinicalbrainlab.github.io". Please make sure that the base is
sources. -
All the left for you to do is to click on that shiny green button to update your changes to the original repository.
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Congratulations! You have successfully updated your profile on our website!
Note that on GitHub (but also when writing research articles), we write in markdown, which is a set of conventions allowing to quickly and easily format text (e.g., text in bold, italic, titles, etc.).
- Further reading
We mostly use Python for signal processing and setting up experimental tasks. For instance, the NeuroKit2 project that we are working on is written in Python. We also build our experimental tasks using Neuropsydia.py which is also a Python module.
Therefore, it's important that you get familiar with the tool. Following are a few resources that we suggest to get you started:
- Download VS Code (or if you already have Winpython installed, simply open
VS Code.exefrom the winpy folder) - Download Python
- Once VS Code is launched, the next step is to add new features and functionalities to support your development workflow. You can do so by installing these extension packages which you can find by clicking on this icon in the activity bar:
- Configure your workspace settings, using the following command:
Ctrl+Shift+Pand click on Preferences: Open Settings (JSON). This opens your usersettings.jsonwhere the following configuration should be copied and pasted to (take note of the key path directories you will need to modify according to your machine!) - To start running some code, click New File and
Ctrl+Sto save the file into whichever directory in your computer you want, naming the file with a.pyextension. PressShift+Enterto send each line of code to an interactive window
The bulk of our statistical analyses and manuscript preparation is done on R.
At this point, you might ask why can't we just stick to one programming language? What is the point of learning both R and Python? The simple answer is that the two programming languages are basically different, and one can be better depending on the task. Read this blog post (R or Python for Psychologists) for a more in-depth discussion.
Following are a few resources to get you started with R:
- Introduction to R
- Help us! Know some good ressources that helped you! Please share it with us
We encourage you to really explore and be integrated within the online scientific community along with us, as this will help you expand your knowledge and skillset as well as become better informed! It may be a steep learning curve initially, but we're here to help you along the way (we've been there ourselves!) and never hesitate to ask questions 😉