Chapter 13 presents the second application of MATLAB to behavioral sciences: data analysis. Students review previously-learned data structures often encountered in practice before applying their programming knowledge from Chapters 1 to 11 to manage each. Starting with tabular data, tables from Chapter 8 are reviewed, with students learning common data science tasks for managing one or more tabular data sets, before applying their knowledge to real experimental data. Next, hierarchical data are reviewed, connecting students’ knowledge of structure arrays from Chapter 8 to a popular internet-based data format (JSON), with students applying their newfound knowledge to analyze data on the behavior of European monarchs.

Chapter 8 further develops students’ understanding of data structures by introducing several new ones. Higher-dimensional arrays are generalizations of the arrays they learned in Chapter 2, but can be hard to visualize because we live in a three-dimensional world, and this chapter includes several suggestions for managing higher-dimensional data. Cell arrays and structure arrays can store any data type, and students learn the unique syntaxes needed to manage this flexibility. Tables store spreadsheet-type data, which students are introduced to formally, while also learning the many indexing and display features that make this data type critical for data analysis. Multiple function outputs from Chapter 3 are introduced as their own data type with additional tricks for managing them. The chapter concludes with general tools for learning the structure of any MATLAB data type and the methods available for using it.