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Cognitive Ethology: A new approach for studyinghuman cognition

Alan Kingstone

*, Daniel Smilek

and John D. Eastwood

Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, British Columbia,Canada

Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Department of Psychology, York University, Ontario, Canada

We all share a desire to understand and predict human cognition and behaviour asit occurs within complex real-world situations. This target article seeks to open adialogue with our colleagues regarding this common goal. We begin by identifying theprinciples of most lab-based investigations and conclude that adhering to them will failto generate valid theories of human cognition and behaviour in natural settings. Wethen present an alternative set of principles within a novel research framework called‘Cognitive Ethology’. We discuss how Cognitive Ethology can complement lab-basedinvestigations, and we show how its levels of description and explanation are distinctfrom what is typically employed in lab-based research.

The studyof human cognition has been punctuated by three historical stages ofadvance(Van Kleeck & Kosslyn, 1991). The ﬁrst stage, beginning in the late 1950s to early 1960s was marked by a rapid progression propelled by the methods of traditionalpsychophysics and experimental psychology. The second stage, beginning by themid-1970s, was fuelled by computational analysis that signalled the arrival of cognitivescience. The third phase, which began in the mid-1980s, incorporated evidence fromneuropsychology and animal neurophysiology, and most recently an ever increasingarray of techniques for scanning the brain of alert participants.In the present article, we take as our starting-point a critical problem that continuesto bedevil the study of human cognition that arose precisely from the original andremarkably successful methods of experimental psychology. Those methods, which involved simplifying the issue of investigation by making the experimental context both impoverished and controlled, sought to discover causal relationships between onefactor and another. The intention was that by minimizing the complexity of theenvironment and maximizing the experimental control, investigators could createtheories that would be universally valid. However, by the mid-1970s it had become very

*Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Alan Kingstone, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (e-mail: alan.kingstone@ubc.ca).

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British Journal of Psychology (2008), 99, 317–340

2008 The British Psychological Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk DOI:10.1348/000712607X251243

Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

clear thatmoststatementsweretrueif,andonlyif,particularlaboratoryconditionsweremet. In other words, the relationship between factor A and factor B was predictable if,and only if, specific conditions were established within the lab; the relationshipbetween factors became unpredictable when these laboratory situations were not met.Thus, for example, memory experiments found that what people remembereddepended on factors such as (a) what processing they performed on the stimulusmaterials; (b) what stimulus materials they expected to receive; (c) what materials wereactually presented; (d) what people were doing before their memory was measured; (e)how their memory was measured, and so on and so forth. The take home message wasthat cognitive processes vary and are affected by what is happening elsewhere withinthe cognitivesystem, and therefore cognitiveprocesses depend criticallyon the specificsituational context in which a subject is embedded.The field’s response to the above fact has generally taken one of the two forms. Onereaction is to deny that there is a problem. This ‘response’ enables one to maintain theinitial assumption that cognitive processes are invariant and unaffected by what ishappening elsewhere, and thus allows one to continue to create and study laboratory-specific phenomenon like ‘nonword repetition memory’ or ‘inhibition of return’. Theother reaction is to acknowledge that there is a problem, but then continue to conductresearch predicated on the assumption that cognitive processes are invariant. Both responses are what Broadbent (1991) has called ‘pathological’.Occasionally, investigators like Donald Broadbent and Ulric Neisser have tried a thirdresponse. They acknowledged that cognitive processes change with situational changesand worked hard to bring the implications of this fact to the awareness of others.Perhaps their only mistake was to trust that the next generation of researchers wouldtake their wordstoheartand trytofinda solution totheissue. Inhindsight, this faith hasproven to be grossly misplaced, as the next generation of researchers have adopted oneof the pathological responses of the past and grounded their neuroimaginginvestigations on the false assumption that cognitive processes are invariant acrosssituations. It is precisely this false assumption that allows researchers to make theremarkable claim that the cognitive processes that theyengage and measure in a simple,artificial brain neuroimaging situation captures the same fundamental cognitiveprocesses and associated neural systems that are engaged in a complex natural situation.The aim of the present paper is modest but against this historical backdrop, webelieve it is vital. We aim to initiate a dialogue among researchers regarding the fact thatcognitive processes vary substantially with changes in context. We also hope tostimulate researchers to find a response tothis issue that is not ‘pathological’. By puttingforward a possible solution of our own, a novel research approach that we call‘Cognitive Ethology’, our intention is to encourage other researchers to develop andadvance their own positive responses. While what follows for the remainder of thispaper focuses primarily on instances of cognition as it pertains to the investigation of human attention, wethink that the issuesweraise here can be readilyextended to other research domains of human cognition.

Laboratory research

Laboratory research in the ﬁeld of human cognition is founded on the criticalassumption that human cognition is subserved by processes that are invariant andregular across situations. This

invariance

assumption enables one to conduct a study in

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the laboratory and then to propose that the process being measured is expressed ineveryday life. Importantly, there is a second assumption that falls out of the ﬁrst. Giventhat processes are assumed to be invariant across situations, it follows that one canreduce situational variability without compromising the nature of the process one ismeasuring. Indeed, a basic objective of the experimental environment in the laboratory is to gain as much

control

over a situation as is possible so that any change can beattributed to the variable that is being manipulated.Together, these assumptions provide a powerful one–two punch. The assumption of process stability enables the scientist to be concerned with real-life situations withoutever having to leave the laboratory. In addition, the assumption of control drives thescientist increasingly away from complex real-life situations to paradigms that aresimple, contrived, and artiﬁcial.These assumptions are not, however, without their risks. For instance, theassumption of invariance eliminates any need or even obligation for the scientist toconﬁrm that the process being manipulated and measured in the laboratory actually expresses itself in the real world. Investigators do, of course, through the process of replication, check that their lab-based effects are regular

within

the laboratory environment. Unfortunately, a result that is invariant within the strict confines of thelaboratory does not mean that it is reproducible outside the lab. Indeed, even a cursory examination of the literature reveals that there are many instances where even the mostminorchange within a laboratory situation will compromise the replicabilityofan effect(e.g. Atchley & Kramer, 2001; Berry & Klein, 1993; Bindemann, Burton, & Langton,2008; Soto-Faraco, Morein-Zamir, & Kingstone, 2005; Wolfe & Pokorny, 1990). Inaddition, as any researcher knows all too well, failed replications that are publishedrepresent just the smallest tip of a very large iceberg of failed replications that areobtained in the laboratory and never published.Upon closer consideration, there is a good reason why lab-based effects should be soremarkably fragile. After all there is a large, well established, and growing body of literature indicating that process stability is tied intimately to the situation used to createit, with participants’ strategies and associated brain configurations changing from onesituation to the next (see for instance Duncan & Owen, 2000 for a review). Neisser (1976) referred to these dynamic configurations as ‘schemata’, Monsell (1996) hasspoken of ‘task-set reconfigurations’, and Di Lollo, Kawahara, Zuvic, and Visser (2001)have referred to ‘configurable input filters’. In each case, the basic message is thatcognitive processes change with situational context; and conversely, process invariancereflects situational stability. We acknowledge that some cognitive processes are relatively regular acrosssituations. Some aspects of language production would seem to qualify. However,critically, based on laboratory findings alone, it is not possible to know whether mechanismsthat appear invariant inthelaboratoryenvironment willsurviveoutsidethelab. Thus, the principle of invariance cannot, and should not, be assumed. This point ismade most forcefullybyBroadbentwhen hewrites: ‘Inlight ofthe evidenceIwouldfeelthis [assumption of invariance] is almost pathological; it can only be preserved by avoiding the literature produced by people who use different background conditions of experiment’ (Broadbent, 1991, p.874).Ironically, any attempt to test the assumption of invariance against real-lifesituations is met immediately with obstacles that arise from the second assumption of experimental control. Thefirstobstacle isthat cognitiveconcepts often becomedefinedby the experimental controls that are used to examine them. For instance, reflexive

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