Comments on: Through a lab darkly

By: florin n

florin n — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:09:59 +0000

everything is relative

By: tom

tom — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:02:31 +0000

Sounds fair enough to me. We can all be epistemological anarchists together

By: Vaughan

Vaughan — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:18:42 +0000

One of the difficulties with the ‘cognitive ethology’ approach is that it works much better for measuring psychophysical variables in the real world (as illustrated in their example).
Many of the things we’d like to measure (e.g. suicidal thoughts) are just bloody hard. The paper goes on to discuss ways of doing this and integrating personal and cognitive explanations but it’s clearly not as straightforward. One way this is being approached though, is ‘experience sampling’ techniques.
To answer your question Tom, I’m a big fan of ad-hocism (‘converging evidence’ if you want to sound a bit academic) in combination with the blunt but effective tool of randomised controlled trials.

By: tom

tom — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:44:36 +0000

I was thinking about this as I cycled to work this morning. The experimental method investigates one factor at a time, but to translate research into application (advice for driving, or mental health, or efficiency or performance or whatever) you need to understand the interactions between all the factors involved — something you’ve deliberately excluded from your experimental investigations. This seems like a bit of sticky issue to me.
From the other end of things, if you don’t carry out experimental investigations then your ‘applied’ investigations will only report what was true in the specific circumstances that you investigated; you won’t necessarily find out what *could* be if you changed some factors (because you haven’t established causality). So your knowledge becomes limited in generalisability, or perhaps it becomes embodied in the intuition of the practioneer, which is unscientifically supported (not necessarily a bad thing) but also possibly wrong and/or uncommunicable too.
Vaughan — as a scientist-practioneer, what do you think?

By: migurski

migurski — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:37:40 +0000

Er, “place” not “places”.

By: migurski

migurski — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:36:10 +0000

For a book-length treatment of this topic, Ed Hutchins’ Cognition In The Wild (1996) is worth a look: http://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Bradford-Books-Edwin-Hutchins/dp/0262581469
He concludes right where Kingstone has just ended up: that studying cognitive processes must include the physical and social environment in which they take places, because so much cognition is externalized in the form of tools and customs.