Cognition in the “real-world”: How, Why and What next?
6 January 2023
In conjunction with the
EPS Meeting: University College London
London, UK | 4-6 January 2023
Organizers:
Description
Most research in cognitive and experimental psychology involves studies on human participants conducted in strictly-controlled laboratory settings. These studies view human participants as information processing systems that can be studied in isolation without necessarily taking into consideration the individual's motivations, affective states, environment and socio-cultural context. While this has provided us with a rigorously controlled framework for investigating human cognition, the ecological validity of such studies is sometimes called into question. In response to this, a distinction is often made between basic fundamental research inside the lab (eg., how distractors are ignored in a visual search task) and applied research in the outside world (eg., how drivers avoid distraction while driving). But, this classification is incomplete as the “real-world” can not be ignored in the lab either. An account of human cognition without actively considering the actual lives people lead outside of the laboratory and devoid of social/cultural context is limited. In this symposium, a diverse group of researchers working across multiple domains will come together to focus on one basic issue: the need to study human cognition in a way that is accurate and representative of the “real” lives of the people being studied.
This symposium will bring together an international group of researchers who have demonstrated expertise in bringing real-world approaches to the study of fundamental questions in cognition. The different talks will examine the notion of ecological validity, why it matters and demonstrate the utility of conducting naturalistic experiments across domains such as attention and reading.
Social Offloading: Evidence for socially embedded distractor suppression
Miles R. A. Tufft
University College London, UK
Daniel C. Richardson
University College London, UK
Attention mechanisms do not exist in isolation but in a world rich in context. With evidence from our joint picture word interference (PWI) paradigm, we demonstrate how meaningful social contexts have the power to facilitate distractor suppression in ways that are sensitive to the social dynamics of dyadic interactions. In the PWI paradigm, participants respond to target pictures while ignoring distractor words. If pictures and words are semantically related, then interference slows responses. We consistently find that this distractor interference is removed when participants believe they are working with another person, but only when that person engages with the distractor word, and is perceived as having particular social traits, such as high status or competency. We conclude that social environments afford the offloading of task-irrelevant distraction in a socially sophisticated manner (social offloading), and we highlight the importance of re-worlding participants in meaningful contexts to reveal the embeddedness of behaviour.
Why automatic attention is intentional
Bernhard Hommel
Technical University Dresden, Germany
Traditional research on the control of human attention relies on a simple logic: Instruct the individual to attend to stimuli of category A and ignore stimuli of category B, and consider every piece of evidence that stimuli belonging to B have been processed as a limitation or breakdown of attentional control. However, this logic rests on the unrealistic assumption that the intentionality of people working on an arbitrary task in a lab is restricted to whatever they have been instructed by the experimenter to do. Once we consider that people do have a life outside of the lab, have goals and intentions related to this life, and do not switch them off when entering the lab, our research logic no longer works. In fact, many, if not all apparent evidence for limitations of attentional control might be due to processes subserving such real-life goals and intentions, and should thus not be taken as evidence for non-intentional processing.
How can face-to-face studies improve understanding of autism?
Megan Freeth
University of Sheffield, UK
Experiencing social interaction and social communication difficulties is core to a diagnosis on the autism spectrum. Understanding how and why social interaction differences occur between autistic and non-autistic people will facilitate understanding of how difficulties can be reduced. In order to create good models of social interaction and communication processes it is important to study behaviour in real-world contexts. In this talk, I will consider evidence from a range of different paradigms that aim to assess key processes and constructs involved in face-to-face interactions including consideration of how these can be isolated and investigated. Evidence will be drawn from paradigms that involve structured interactions measuring behavioural responses and tracking of eye movements, using both desk-mounted and mobile eye-trackers. Overall, the evidence presented will demonstrate the potential that face-to-face interaction studies afford in furthering our understanding of the processes underlying social interaction and social communication.
Deconstructing the myth of normal reading and its implications
Falk Huettig
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands/Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Fernanda Ferreira
University of California at Davis, USA
We argue that the educational and psychological sciences must embrace the diversity of reading rather than chase the phantom of normal reading behavior. This leads to certain implications. First, there are important lessons for how to conduct psycholinguistic experiments. Second, we need to move beyond Anglo-centric reading research and produce theoretical and computational models of reading that reflect the large cross-cultural diversity of languages and types of writing systems. Third, we must acknowledge that there are multiple ways of reading and reasons for reading, and none of them is normal or better or a “gold standard”. Finally, we must stop stigmatizing individuals who read differently and for different reasons, and there should be increased focus on teaching the ability to extract information relevant to the person’s goals. What is important is not how well and how fast people read but what people comprehend given their own stated goals.
Looking at children’s books to fill gaps in the science of reading
Sonali Nag
University of Oxford, UK
The science of reading is rightly rooted in a cognitive-linguistic view of literacy learning. Even so, current theorising about learning to read is skewed because the evidence base is yet to be informed by most of the world’s languages. Two practical propositions could be a starting point to broaden the evidence base: first, the setting up of child-directed print corpora in these languages and second, the mapping of the psycholinguistic properties of such corpora. The opportunity comes from the growing numbers of book titles in languages traditionally underrepresented in the publishing industry. We find that when such child-directed print corpora are mindful of the coverage statistics of book levels and book types, a developmental catalogue of real-world print encounters can be drawn up. These include under-theorised architectural principles of writing systems and language features at the level of phonology, morphology and syntax. We conclude that the boost needed to identify and fill the gaps in current accounts of literacy development could come from local children’s books.
Stage magic in the “real world”
Gustav Kuhn
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Magic is an artform that allows us to experience things that we believe to be impossible. Stage magicians have developed powerful psychological tricks to manipulate our conscious experience of the world, and many of these tricks rely on carefully orchestrated social interactions. In this talk I will examine evidence from a wide range of empirical studies that explore how the nature of the social interaction (i.e., real or simulated) impacts the deceptive nature of the magic trick (i.e., the method) and the way in which the tricks are experienced (i.e., the effect). Misdirection, in which the magician uses social cues to orchestrate people’s overt and covert attention appears just as effective when experienced live, as opposed to on video. Likewise, studies in which the magician uses gestures to influence a person’s decision (i.e., forcing) reveal only minor differences when the tricks are performed live as opposed to video recordings of the same trick. In the final part I will examine studies that focus on the emotions that magic can elicit. Participants who watch magic performances on video report strong emotions, which were comparable to when the effects are experienced live. Magicians are remarkably effective at manipulating people’s conscious experiences and many of these principles, as well as the emotions that they elicit, don’t seem to rely on genuine social interactions.
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