Cognitive Ethology: a New Approach for Studying Human Cognition

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The British Psychological British Journal of Psychology (2008), 99, 317–340 Society q 2008 The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk

Cognitive Ethology: A new approach for studying human cognition

Alan Kingstone1*, Daniel Smilek2 and John D. Eastwood3 1Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada 2Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 3Department of Psychology, York University, Ontario, Canada

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

The study of human cognition has been punctuated by three historical stages of advance (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 traditional psychophysics and experimental psychology. The second stage, beginning by the mid-1970s, was fuelled by computational analysis that signalled the arrival of cognitive science. The third phase, which began in the mid-1980s, incorporated evidence from neuropsychology and animal neurophysiology, and most recently an ever increasing array of techniques for scanning the brain of alert participants. In the present article, we take as our starting-point a critical problem that continues to bedevil the study of human cognition that arose precisely from the original and remarkably 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 one factor and another. The intention was that by minimizing the complexity of the environment and maximizing the experimental control, investigators could create theories 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: [email protected]).

318 Alan Kingstone et al. clear that most statements were true if, and only if, particular laboratory conditions were met. 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 relationship between factors became unpredictable when these laboratory situations were not met. Thus, for example, memory experiments found that what people remembered depended on factors such as (a) what processing they performed on the stimulus materials; (b) what stimulus materials they expected to receive; (c) what materials were actually 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 was that cognitive processes vary and are affected by what is happening elsewhere within the cognitive system, and therefore cognitive processes depend critically on the specific situational context in which a subject is embedded. The field’s response to the above fact has generally taken one of the two forms. One reaction is to deny that there is a problem. This ‘response’ enables one to maintain the initial assumption that cognitive processes are invariant and unaffected by what is happening elsewhere, and thus allows one to continue to create and study laboratory- specific phenomenon like ‘nonword repetition memory’ or ‘inhibition of return’. The other reaction is to acknowledge that there is a problem, but then continue to conduct research 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 third response. They acknowledged that cognitive processes change with situational changes and 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 would take their words to heart and try to find a solution to the issue. In hindsight, this faith has proven to be grossly misplaced, as the next generation of researchers have adopted one of the pathological responses of the past and grounded their neuroimaging investigations on the false assumption that cognitive processes are invariant across situations. It is precisely this false assumption that allows researchers to make the remarkable claim that the cognitive processes that they engage and measure in a simple, artificial brain neuroimaging situation captures the same fundamental cognitive processes 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, we believe it is vital. We aim to initiate a dialogue among researchers regarding the fact that cognitive processes vary substantially with changes in context. We also hope to stimulate researchers to find a response to this issue that is not ‘pathological’. By putting forward a possible solution of our own, a novel research approach that we call ‘Cognitive Ethology’, our intention is to encourage other researchers to develop and advance their own positive responses. While what follows for the remainder of this paper focuses primarily on instances of cognition as it pertains to the investigation of human attention, we think that the issues we raise here can be readily extended to other research domains of human cognition.

Laboratory research Laboratory research in the ﬁeld of human cognition is founded on the critical assumption that human cognition is subserved by processes that are invariant and regular across situations. This invariance assumption enables one to conduct a study in Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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the laboratory and then to propose that the process being measured is expressed in everyday life. Importantly, there is a second assumption that falls out of the first. Given that processes are assumed to be invariant across situations, it follows that one can reduce situational variability without compromising the nature of the process one is measuring. 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 be attributed 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 without ever having to leave the laboratory. In addition, the assumption of control drives the scientist increasingly away from complex real-life situations to paradigms that are simple, contrived, and artificial. These assumptions are not, however, without their risks. For instance, the assumption of invariance eliminates any need or even obligation for the scientist to confirm 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 the laboratory 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 most minor change within a laboratory situation will compromise the replicability of an effect (e.g. Atchley & Kramer, 2001; Berry & Klein, 1993; Bindemann, Burton, & Langton, 2008; Soto-Faraco, Morein-Zamir, & Kingstone, 2005; Wolfe & Pokorny, 1990). In addition, as any researcher knows all too well, failed replications that are published represent just the smallest tip of a very large iceberg of failed replications that are obtained in the laboratory and never published. Upon closer consideration, there is a good reason why lab-based effects should be so remarkably 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 create it, with participants’ strategies and associated brain configurations changing from one situation to the next (see for instance Duncan & Owen, 2000 for a review). Neisser (1976) referred to these dynamic configurations as ‘schemata’, Monsell (1996) has spoken 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 that cognitive processes change with situational context; and conversely, process invariance reflects situational stability. We acknowledge that some cognitive processes are relatively regular across situations. Some aspects of language production would seem to qualify. However, critically, based on laboratory findings alone, it is not possible to know whether mechanisms that appear invariant in the laboratory environment will survive outside the lab. Thus, the principle of invariance cannot, and should not, be assumed. This point is made most forcefully by Broadbent when he writes: ‘In light of the evidence I would feel this [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-life situations is met immediately with obstacles that arise from the second assumption of experimental control. The first obstacle is that cognitive concepts often become defined by the experimental controls that are used to examine them. For instance, reflexive Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

320 Alan Kingstone et al. attention is often defined as a process that benefits the detection of, and response to, a visual target stimulus that occurs shortly after the abrupt onset of a peripheral, spatially non-predictive, stimulus event. It is not clear whether such a sequence of events ever occurs naturally in real life, and if it did, how this event could be measured. Let us accept for the moment that this first obstacle is somehow overcome, and reflexive attention as defined in the laboratory is measured in the real world. A researcher is then immediately posed with the second obstacle of having to make the case that the data collected in the real-life situation are, in fact, a manifestation of the same process being measured in the lab. This is a daunting, and perhaps an ultimately impossible, obstacle to surmount. Our reservation is derived from the very fact that variables that are controlled in the laboratory are not controlled in real life. Therefore, a real-world effect that appears to be the product of a controlled laboratory effect can always be re-attributed to factors that were uncontrolled in real life. Conversely, the failure to find evidence of a laboratory effect in the real world can be dismissed, as it is a fallacy to conclude that something does not occur simply because one does not find evidence for its existence. Thus, there is no direct way to demonstrate or refute that causal factors found in a simple lab-based setting are also being expressed in a complex real-world situation. Note that the purported real-world relevance of lab-based findings cannot be falsified; such claims, therefore, are, in this most important regard, unscientific. Driving the nail further into this coffin is the fact that general systems theory (see Ward, 2002; Weinberg, 1975) has demonstrated that tight experimental control can be effective at revealing the basic characteristics of simple linear systems but it is ineffective at revealing the characteristics of complex, non-linear systems, which must surely include the human cognitive system. General systems theory holds that certain stable characteristics of complex systems are only revealed, or emerge, when several variables are able to vary together. Of course, this is precisely what is prohibited in controlled laboratory situations, and it is precisely what occurs in uncontrolled natural situations.

Cognitive Ethology If there are both practical and principled reasons to conclude that lab-based studies grounded on the assumptions of invariance and control are unlikely to inform us about cognitive processes as they are expressed in real-life situations, then what are researchers to do? Our experience, like that of Broadbent’s (1991), has been that, whether or not researchers acknowledge that the assumptions of invariance and control are problematic, they behave as if these assumptions are unproblematic and that they will lead to cognitive theories that are universally valid. We sympathize with these responses and fully acknowledge that we have indulged in them ourselves. There is much to be said for denial. It lets one continue to do what one loves to do – to generate questions and hypotheses, design experiments, collect data, write papers, go to conferences, interact with colleagues, mentor students, and in general to ‘move forward’ in one’s career as a scientist. Any and all of these items are powerful motivators for us to look away from the basic fact that doing our simple experimental lab-based studies is not going to enable us to develop theories that can predict and explain cognitive processes as they are expressed in real-world situations. A second option, and one that we explore in the remainder of this paper, is to ﬁrst directly study how people behave in their natural real-world environments before moving into the lab. That is, Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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rather than being locked into a laboratory paradigm with the a priori assumption that the paradigm or task that is being applied is tapping into processes that are expressed in everyday life-situations, one would instead opt to explore first how people behave as they function within a naturally occurring situation. Once this complex problem space is identified and described then one could begin to move into the laboratory to test hypotheses that are generated by real-world observations. We have called this approach ‘Cognitive Ethology’. A Nature publication by Land and Lee (1994) provides a good illustration of a research approach that is grounded in the principle of first examining performance as it naturally occurs. These investigators were interested in understanding where people look when they are steering a car around a corner. This simple issue had obvious implications for human attention and action, as well as for matters as diverse as human performance modelling, vehicle engineering, and road design. To study this issue, Land and Lee monitored eye, head, steering wheel position, and car speed, as drivers navigated a particularly tortuous section of road. Their study revealed the new and important finding that drivers rely on a ‘tangent point’ on the inside of each curve, seeking out this point 1–2 seconds before each bend and returning to it reliably. For the present purposes, what is especially striking about the Land and Lee paper is that it was conducted without falling into the standard experimental assumptions of invariance and control. By stating that one is interested in understanding how one performs in a real-world situation, like driving around a corner, one is implicitly acknowledging that there may be no model laboratory task that can speak to the question under consideration. In other words, this Cognitive Ethology research approach rejects the assumption of process stability. In doing so, it assumes that processes may be contextualized to the situation within which they occur. The Land and Lee study is also important because by choosing to measure performance as it naturally occurs, Land and Lee were rejecting the standard a priori assumption that variance that is not manipulated experimentally is something to be controlled. This alternative way to deal with variance, to let it occur naturally and measure it, is based on the assumption that variance may reveal key characteristics of cognitive processing. In other words, it is based on the assumption that variance is part of the complex cognitive signal that must be understood. This is the second key assumption underlying the Cognitive Ethology approach. It also dovetails with the basic tenet of general systems theory that complex systems are only revealed, or emerge, when several variables are free to co-occur. At a first glance it may seem that Cognitive Ethology is merely espousing an ‘applied’ approach to research, that is, an approach that will result in a non-integrated collection of insights regarding human behaviour in specific real-world contexts. While such knowledge is of unquestionable utility, it is not our focus. We wish to make a far broader and deeper claim. We argue that cognitive processes and behaviours that are generalizable and meaningful are most likely to reveal themselves when people are studied first under the real-world conditions where multiple variables are free to co-occur. Specifically, we argue that it is by starting with real-world observations and individual variation that one is most likely to generate subsequent research questions for investigation that may lead to general principles of cognition that have relevance to naturally occurring phenomena. Note that we are not stating that by studying behaviour outside the laboratory one can assume that generalization between situations will occur (see for instance the study by Underwood, Chapman, Crundall, Cooper, & Wallen, 1999 which suggests important limitations to the Land and Lee (1994) investigation). Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Rather, we are saying that by starting at this level of investigation one can begin to ask questions that are truly relevant to the real world; and over time begin to draw out features of behaviour that are common across natural situations by conducting studies both inside and outside of the laboratory (see for instance Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005). In sum, the Cognitive Ethology research approach rejects the standard assumptions of invariance and control, and in their place we find a commitment to understanding the situation against its real-life background conditions and the variance within that environment. According to this approach, the initial job of the researcher is simply to observe, describe, and measure what people do and experience in the situation of interest (see also Koch, 1999; Rosch, 1999). In this regard, description of real-world behaviour and experience serves to define the ‘explananda’ of inquiry. Of course, such an observation is unlikely to be of much value in artificial laboratory situations where human behaviour is typically highly constrained. For instance, in a typical fMRI attention experiment that measures human behaviour and brain activations, people are only allowed to move one finger to press one key, with all other movements, including even minor head and eye-movements prohibited. Yet, the observation of real-world behaviour is very different. As stated by Koch (1999, p. 27), ‘description is no lowly or easy task; it is in fact the very basis – indeed, the flesh – of non-spurious knowledge’. Description of people’s cognitive functioning in complex real-world situations is intrinsically valuable and meaningful because it is grounded in reality and therefore maps out precisely what cognitive research ultimately seeks to predict and understand. Related to the emphasis on describing cognitive functioning in the real world is the notion that researchers can begin their research enterprise by describing cognition in the concepts that are used in everyday ‘folk-psychological’ language (see Prinzmetal & Taylor, 2006; Birmingham, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2008, for recent instances of folk psychology helping to guide research). To be clear, this approach does not entail necessarily accepting ‘folk-psychological’ explanations of cognitive functioning, nor does it reject the idea that important concepts should be refined and given more technical meanings on the bases of subsequent scientific inquiry. Rather, the Cognitive Ethology approach simply asserts that there is a potential benefit of initially grounding our observations and concepts in real-world situations. Just as there were practical problems for the assumptions of invariance and control when they are applied to understanding real-world phenomena, one finds that there are also practical problems for the assumptions of situation and variance. One key problem is quite simply that it is very hard to do research at the real-world level. It is hard for several reasons. First, it is difficult because there are no ‘off the shelf’ model tasks to use when one conducts this form of research. Hence, one cannot, for instance, simply manipulate the Posner cueing paradigm or the visual search paradigm and claim that one is gaining new insights into how people allocate their attention in everyday life (see Kingstone, 1992; Eastwood & Smilek, 2005 for precisely this type of claim). Instead, one has to spend a good deal of time observing and describing what people are doing. In addition, because one is not attempting to control what people do, there is a tremendous amount of variation in the behaviour that people produce whether it is different people at the same time or one person at different times. It is also difficult because there is relatively little scientific data on how people behave in the real-world situations rather than in artificial laboratory environments. This means that what questions and approaches are most interesting and likely to bear fruit are largely unknown. It also means that there may be little or no previous work performed on how Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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to go about analysing the data one collects, and therefore, one may have to create new analysis tools to gain a full understanding of the data that has been collected. We would argue, however, that these challenges are better viewed as exciting opportunities for researchers interested in truly discovering and understanding human cognition. All the complex real-world data one collects, and all the questions that one explores and answers, provide a foundation for future investigations and a benchmark against which other studies can be measured. By beginning one’s research enterprise at the level of natural performance rather than lab-based manipulations one sets out to discover what really happens in the world, and in the words of Neisser ‘ﬁnding out what really happens in the world around us ::: will be worth knowing in any imaginable future’ (Neisser, 1976, p. 10).

Integrating Cognitive Ethology with laboratory investigations Our position, that Cognitive Ethology and lab-based studies are founded on opposing assumptions, raises the question as to whether these two approaches should be viewed as competing or complementary. On the one hand, they may be seen as competing frameworks. Informal discussions with our colleagues, as well as a historical reading of the field (e.g. Banaji & Crowder, 1989; Neisser, 1991), indicates that real-world and lab- based investigations have tended to be viewed as competitive enterprises. Our demonstration that the two forms of research are based on opposing assumptions makes this conflict between approaches a natural one. Yet, their goal is ultimately the same – to predict and explain human cognition as it operates in the real world. Therefore, one would think that the two frameworks might be able to operate in harmony rather than opposition. We would go one step further and suggest that only when both approaches are rigorously pursued will it be possible to achieve the goal of understanding how cognition operates in everyday settings. In short, we see these two research frameworks as complementary and mutually constraining. This point is illustrated by a second Nature paper by Land and Horwood (1995) that followed up on the original Land and Lee (1994) investigation. Land and Horwood conducted controlled laboratory experiments in a driving simulator to determine what kinds of cornering information are critical to normal, and abnormal, driving performance. They did this by systematically removing corner information that is normally present in the real-world driving environment. The critical point that we wish to make here is that the laboratory experiment conducted by Land and Horwood (1995) was based on a rigorous description of driving behaviour in the real world reported by Land and Lee (1994). Once that description was in place, then the obvious transition was to the laboratory to recreate, control, and manipulate the effect. Notice though that without first having discovered what people do in the real-world driving situation Land and Horwood would be unable to identify when lab-based performance was abnormal. Thus, by starting at the real-world level, one is grounded in what people really do when they are not in the lab, and hence, one can determine what behaviours are, and are not, specific to the laboratory environment. In summary, the work by Land and colleagues provides a good example of how complex real-world descriptions provide a series of systematically articulated observations to which lab-based investigations can be linked and validated. Once real-world observations are made, the laboratory-based approach can then be applied to evaluate Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

324 Alan Kingstone et al. and study real-world behaviour by systematically imposing control. In this way, it is possible for Cognitive Ethology investigations to guide laboratory investigations. Without such guidance, lab-based investigations run the real risk of moving further and further away from everyday situations and studying behaviours and theoretical conceptualizations that are meaningful only to the artiﬁcial environments that give rise to them. Finally, it is also worth noting that the Cognitive Ethology research approach provides a way for the research enterprise to be immediately and effectively self- correcting. This is because if people begin to behave differently in the laboratory than in real life, for instance, no longer using the ‘tangent point’ while cornering in a simulator, the investigator is alerted to the fact that there is something in the laboratory that fails to capture what people really do in the real world. This sensitivity to whether a laboratory environment is, or is not, able to scale up to the natural world is absent when one applies the current operating standard of conducting laboratory research ﬁrst in isolation from any systematic naturalistic observation.

Personal and subpersonal levels of explanation Following Dennett (1969, 1978; see also Pessoa, Thompson, & Noe, 1998) we believe it is important to distinguish between two levels of explanation referred to as the personal level and the subpersonal level. Personal-level explanations focus on describing and understanding the person as a whole organism interacting with his or her environment. Here the focus is both on what the active, engaged person is doing in the environment and what information is available to that person to support purposeful, functional behaviour. In contrast, subpersonal-level explanations involve describing and understanding the person in terms of the internal organization and processes of the brain. Here the focus is on the brain mechanisms that subserve cognition, what information is available to those mechanisms, and how these mechanisms process the information. Laboratory studies of cognition typically focus on explaining behaviour at the subpersonal level in terms of the mind/brain mechanisms that underlie cognition. A good example of attention studies aimed at a subpersonal level of explanation is provided by studies of covert attention (e.g. Posner, 1978). Covert visual attention refers to the selection that occurs without movement of the eyes. In other words, covert attention is a selection mechanism within the mind/brain and it is often believed to be subsumed by several neural networks (e.g. Posner & Raichle, 1998), with the midbrain responsible for the movement of attention, the thalamus controlling the engagement of attention, and the parietal lobe managing the disengagement of covert spatial attention. Similarly, the standard box and arrow diagrams that identify attention as a stage or process in an information-processing framework (see Pashler, 1998) and the various brain areas that have been identiﬁed in neuroimaging studies as being relevant to attention (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002) are all explanations of attention at a subpersonal level. Subpersonal explanations often aim to explain cognitive behaviour by assuming that cognitive processes and their associated neural activations are relatively invariant across different background conditions. Though most studies of cognition focus on uncovering subpersonal explanations of human cognition and performance, there are good reasons to believe that such a level of explanation is not sufﬁcient. First, subpersonal explanations often do not provide a satisfying answer as to why cognitive performance is how it is. Second, subpersonal Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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explanations fail to explain how cognitive performance relates to other cognitive systems. Third, subpersonal explanation fails to recognize that cognition is inherently distributed among multiple individuals (e.g. shared attention during reading or problem solving) and the environmental context (e.g. use of memory aids like a personal digital assistant (PDA) or a pilot’s use of cockpit gauges). In each case, the shortcomings of the subpersonal account are addressed by a personal-level explanation. We illustrate these points below. Visual search asymmetry refers to the finding that looking for an object is not equally efficient when the role of target and distractor is reversed in a search display. For example, in Figure 1 search is less efficient when the white-topped item is the target and the black-topped items are distractors (as shown) than when this relation is reversed. To experience this effect, simply turn Figure 1 upside down and look for the target. The target is now the black-topped item and it stands out conspicuously among white- topped distractors. Why should an apparently trivial feature difference between target and distractors, such as which is white on top and black on the bottom, have such a profound effect on search performance? A subpersonal explanation will typically sidestep this larger question and point to a different neural pattern of activation for the two different search conditions or propose a mechanism at some level of the information-processing highway. Yet, such explanations do not provide an answer to the original and bigger question of ‘why?’. To provide this answer, researchers reach out to a personal level of explanation, grounding their account on how people interact with their everyday environments. Thus, they propose that human vision is biased to expect a scene to be lit from overhead because in the real world there is a single sun that shines overhead illuminating objects from the top (Ramachandran, 1988; van Zoest, Giesbrecht, Enns, & Kingstone, 2006). Specifically, the effect of such lighting in a three-dimensional environment is to produce shading gradients in the resulting image. Objects that are uniform in their surface coloration and generally convex will tend to be lighter at the top, where the surfaces have a more direct access to the light source, and darker at the bottom, where light is less able to reach the surface. A bias to interpret the meaning of these patterns of luminance is thus used to explain why search difficulty varies in Figure 1, where the items can be interpreted as being influenced by overhead lighting. It also explains why the search asymmetry in Figure 1 favoured the black-topped target, as this runs against the standard expectation of scene shading. Thus, one finds that the personal-level explanation complements, and ultimately grounds, the subpersonal explanation. A second example is simpler, but no less compelling. It is well accepted that attention can be drawn to many different changes to stimulus features – colour, shape, motion, luminance, and presentation of a new object in the visual field. Importantly, some of these features are more effective than others at attracting attention, for example a luminance change is generally more effective than a colour change in attracting attention. One explanation, a subpersonal account, would interpret these differences in terms of inherent differences in neural signal properties. For instance, light or motion changes are more effective in attracting attention than colour or form change because the magnocellular visual pathway (which is concerned with processing luminance and motion) is more rapid than the parvocellular visual pathway (which is concerned with processing colour and form). According to this subpersonal viewpoint, a new object should have no privileged influence on attentional orienting, over and above the influence of its constituent features. However, this is not the case. The presence of a Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Figure 1. Search is harder when the white-topped item is the target and the black-topped items are distractors (as shown) than when this relation is reversed. This effect can be experienced by turning the ﬁgure upside down and looking for the black-topped target which stands out conspicuously among white-topped distractors. This black-topped target is thought to be easy to ﬁnd because it runs against our everyday expectation of scene shading where items are normally lit from the top, for example, by a single sun overhead.

new object is more effective in attracting attention than any other feature change (Yantis, 1993). Why do new objects exert such a powerful inﬂuence? To answer this question investigators have again gone beyond the subpersonal level of explanation and provided a personal-level account that is based on the relevance that different features play in an individual’s everyday life (Enns, Austen, Di Lollo, Rauschenberger, & Yantis, 2001). Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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They note that while feature changes like colour and shape are important, they are not as fundamentally important to an individual as is the appearance of a new object. Why? Because feature changes may be considered as updates to a known stimulus object, whereas the appearance of a new object introduces an unknown item into the scene, one which must first be identified, for example, as a predator or a prey. Thus, one finds again that subpersonal explanations do not provide a compelling understanding of why a cognitive process operates as it does. That account is provided by a complementary personal-level explanation. Subpersonal explanations of cognition, for instance ones which identify cognitive processes solely as information-processing mechanisms within the brain, also fail to provide a satisfactory explanation of more systemic aspects of cognition such as the sorts of attentional behaviour that emerge when two or more individuals are communicating or are engaged in a common task. Yet, such collaborative attention is critical in our everyday lives, particularly in safety critical sectors such as aviation. In December 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades. The reason: Three experienced professional pilots simultaneously focused their attention on a small malfunctioning indicator light and no one was paying attention to the fact that the autopilot had disengaged. As a result of this catastrophic failure of collaborative attention, no one was flying the plane (Vicente, 2003). The important point of this example for present purposes is that the cognitive dynamics that ultimately led to the crash of Flight 401 are difficult to explain based on subpersonal mechanisms that are localized within the mind/brain of an individual. The clear failure of attention occurred as a result of the interaction between individuals and was therefore distributed among individuals and their immediate environment. Such distributed cognition (see Hutchins, 1995) requires a different level of explanation, a personal-level account that includes a consideration of multiple individuals, their current goals, abilities, and beliefs, as well as their specific situational demands. Collaborative attention has already been established as a critical factor for child learning and development (e.g. Tomasello, 1995; Dunham & Moore, 1995). For instance, numerous studies of joint attention in human infants has shown that 1-year old infants are able to follow the direction of gaze of others (e.g. Butterworth & Corchran, 1980; for a review see Tomasello, 1995) and that children as young as 2 years make inferences about where a parent is attending when acquiring language skills (Tomasello & Todd, 1983). Such joint attention has even been linked to development of theory-of-mind in children (e.g. Charman et al., 2000), arguably one of the more critical characteristics of well-adjusted adults. As with the crew members of Flight 401, the cognitive dynamics that underlie joint attention in children and their parents, or any two or more individuals for that matter, cannot be satisfactorily explained solely with reference to subpersonal mind/brain mechanisms within an individual. A personal level of explanation is again required. To reiterate, the personal level of explanation focuses on understanding human cognition as operating in service of individuals as they interact with an ever-changing real-world environment. The specific focus is on explaining cognition in terms of (a) the behaviour of whole embodied people and their interaction with their environment and others around them (Pessoa et al., 1998) and (b) people’s subjective experiences, goals, and beliefs (see Jack & Roepstorff, 2003). Rather than solely construing cognition as a neural or information-processing system, explanations of cognitive performance at the personal level construe cognition as an overt system involving an embodied individual, an environment (which includes other people), and the person’s goals, purposes, and beliefs. Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Although the personal and subpersonal are two distinct ways of describing and understanding human cognition, they are clearly related and can, in a complementary manner, enrich our overall understanding of human cognition. For instance, a personal- level approach to the study of attention can assist the subpersonal approach reach its goal of understanding how attention operates in everyday settings. Specifically, by concretely describing how cognition functions at the personal level it can become clear which situations and variables are important to study at a subpersonal level. We do not mean to suggest that in the past subpersonal studies have been conducted completely without any guidance from personal-level observations. Indeed, most researchers use their own informal personal-level observations to guide their research to some extent. However, this is certainly not the kind of personal-level guidance that we are suggesting here. In fact, there are several reasons to believe that this type of informal guidance has led subpersonal investigations further away from the real world rather than closer to it. First, a researcher’s informal observations are often guided primarily by the constraints of their laboratory paradigm or a particular theoretical framework to which they adhere. Such observations are inherently biased and serve to further perpetuate the existing views (Kingstone, Smilek, Ristic, Friesen, & Eastwood, 2003). Thus, while such informal observations give the appearance that subpersonal research is being guided by real-world descriptions, in actuality, the subpersonal framework may be constraining and overly determining personal-level observations. In addition, informal observations may not be representative of many of the possible outcomes in the real world and therefore can generate laboratory paradigms that reflect and entrench these limitations. Without a systematic, clear, and extensive articulation of how individuals behave in the real world, it is unclear how one can evaluate the merit of either the informal observations made by researchers or, more importantly, whether the laboratory findings are consistent with how people behave in the real world. For these reasons we propose that informal personal-level observations are not sufficient to guide subpersonal research and that personal-level descriptions of attention are necessary. It is precisely this systematic articulation of cognition at the personal level that is currently lacking. In addition to guiding subpersonal studies, personal-level explanations can also reveal the reasons why subpersonal mechanisms function as they do. Consider the search asymmetry and attention capture by new objects examples discussed earlier. Though, of course, there must be some subpersonal brain mechanisms that underlie these behaviours, the reasons why those mechanisms function the way that they do only becomes apparent when one considers the behaviour of the individual at the personal level. A similar argument has recently been made by Findlay and Gilchrist (2003) regarding the function of covert attention. They argue that covert attention, as it is understood in the lab-based settings (i.e. orienting without any concomitant eye-movements), does not seem to serve any important purpose. They give several reasons. First, spatial cueing leads to relatively small increases in the speed of responses to a cued target, being often less than 40 ms. Second, the speed with which covert attention is shifted is not substantially faster than overt shifts of attention. And third, covert attention is not a necessary explanation of the apparent limitations in capacity because selection can occur at many levels of the system. According to Findlay and Gilchrist (2003), the purpose and function of covert attention becomes clear only when covert attention is considered as part of a larger attention system which involves the act of overt eye- movements as individuals select information from their environment. Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Collectively, the ideas presented in this section suggest the assertion that cognitive processes, like covert attention, cannot be fully understood at the subpersonal level unless the explanation is grounded in a personal-level understanding of peoples’ overt cognitive behaviour and their experiences, beliefs, and intentions as they select information in their everyday environments. We explore this proposal in the next section.

Cognitive Ethology and subjective experience Consistent with our position that a personal-level description and explanation is critically important to scientific investigations, we suggest that it is essential that one seek to observe and describe the subjective experiences of individuals as well as their overtly observable (objective) experiences. It should go without saying that subjective experience is at the heart of cognitive performance in complex natural settings. For instance, we select objects in our environment to become conscious of them and then to flexibly interact with them. Yet, laboratory studies of cognition rely heavily on measures of objective behaviour and often ignore subjective experience. For example, studies of attention using the Posner cueing paradigm measure spatial attention by measuring peoples’ objective response time and accuracy as they detect a target stimulus. In fact, measuring people’s reaction time and accuracy as they detect, identify, or localize simple stimuli constitutes one of the primary measures used in studies of attention. Other objective measures range from monitoring eye-movements to recording brain activations. We refer to these objective measures of behaviour as third-person measures because they can be observed by someone other than the individual involved in the behaviour (see Varela & Shear, 1999). Subjective reports, that is, first-person measures of personal experiences and beliefs, are largely ignored in cognition for several reasons. First, there is the general belief, which appears to be a remnant of behaviourism’s objection to the way that structuralists used introspection, that subjective reports are not reliable and replicable across individuals. Second, it is thought that introspecting about subjective experience might change and bias subjective experience (see Lutz & Thomas, 2003). Third, subjective reports are often believed to be vulnerable to experimenter demands. Fourth, subpersonal mechanisms of cognitive performance, which are the primary interest of experimental psychologists, are assumed to operate below conscious awareness. Finally, on occasion, even when peoples’ subjective reports agree across individuals, they may be inconsistent with their behaviour (Hurlbert & Heavey, 2001; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). For this impressive list of reasons, subjective reports have fallen by the wayside. However, perhaps these concerns are not as compelling as they first appear to be. After all, many of the criticisms levelled against the use of subjective reports are general experimental problems that also apply to objective measures of performance. Consider the first criticism above, that subjective reports are unreliable. In actuality, perceived unreliability of subjective reports in the ‘structuralist’ research programme was due primarily to ‘the problem of inducing the same mental states in many observers where the states were sufficiently stable to allow consistent judgments across observers’ (Ericsson, 2003, p. 5, italics added). Therefore, the problem was not in the method of introspection but rather with the stability of the experience. The reader will notice, as we have noted in the first section of this paper, that this same issue of stability/invariance also plagues objective third-person laboratory studies of cognitive performance. Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Also not unique to subjective reports is the second concern noted above, namely that introspection might change or bias subjective experience. The fact that studying a factor might change that factor is true of laboratory studies of mechanisms as well. In fact, this idea forms a core reason to our claim that mechanisms studied in the laboratory might not operate in the same way in the real world. Most generally, this is an instance of the well-established Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, an epistemological limitation that plagues many scientific enterprises and is certainly not unique to reports of subjective experience. Similarly, the third objection, that subjective reports are easily biased by experimenter demands, can also apply to objective measures of performance, for instance studies of cognitive processes of race (e.g. Gehring, Karpinski, & Hilton, 2003). Therefore, in these regards, subjective reports and objective measures are vulnerable to the same possible shortcomings. It is also worth noting that over the past several decades, there have been considerable advances in the development of first- person methodologies that minimize the extent to which introspective reports bias conscious experience and the extent to which they are susceptible to experimenter demands (see Dennett, 2003; Ericsson, 2003; Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Lutz & Thompson, 2003). The latter two criticisms of subjective reports are also not as problematic as one might first be led to believe. The fourth concern was that subjective reports are not useful for studying cognition because people do not have conscious access to subpersonal mechanisms, which likely operate below conscious awareness. This seems reasonable and true. But, as we have noted above, a subpersonal level of explanation alone cannot be expected to provide a meaningful explanation of cognitive performance in complex real-world settings. At a personal level of explanation, subjective reports can be extremely useful because they can provide direct access to peoples’ beliefs, intentions, goal, and actions, which are critical for that level of explanation (see Lutz & Thompson, 2003). Finally, the fact that subjective reports and objective behaviour disagree with each other (see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) occurs only in specific situations and is certainly not the rule across all situations (see Lutz & Thompson, 2003; Smilek, Eastwood, Reynolds, & Kingstone, 2007, In press; Wilson, 2003). Thus, under closer consideration, it appears that subjective and objective reports may share a common and imperfect foundation. In fact, it could be argued that subjective reports are in some ways ‘more primary’ than indirect objective measures of cognition. Indeed, some form of introspective methodology is an integral part of all ‘objective’ methods (Jack & Ropstroff, 2002, 2003). For instance, experiments are often designed based on the subjective experience of the experimenter. Most of us have been trained to consider our preferred paradigms and tasks in a manner that enables us to introspect on how one might behave and to make predictions and gain insights about the resulting data. Similarly, experimental instructions involve an interpersonal exchange between experimenter and subject in which the experimenter provides the participant with ‘a model of how they should carry out the experimental task’ (Jack & Roepstorff, 2003, p. vii). Data are also sometimes understood or validated on the basis of informal interviews following an experiment, such as whether a stimulus was consciously experienced or not. Subjective experiences are, therefore, inherent to objective experimental studies of cognition. Our position is that subjective reports represent an extremely powerful and valid tool for exploring personal-level explanations of cognitive performance. First, they can provide direct access to participants’ explicit goals, intentions, and behaviour in everyday situations. Reason’s (e.g., 1979, 1984) exploration of people’s slips of attention Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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is a good example of this use of subjective reports. Reason conducted several diary studies in which large groups of participants provided detailed reports of their everyday slips of attention (e.g. putting the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge). Reason provides many examples of reports of such attentions slips that simply could not be measured using objective methods; only the subjective reports clearly captured an individual’s goals and intention as well as the details of the events that occurred at unexpected and relatively infrequent times in everyday life (which is when attention slips often occur). Based on his analysis of these subjective reports of attention slips, Reason was able to create a classification system for ‘actions not as planned’ and also put forth a compelling theory about how such slips come about. Surprisingly little has been done to follow up this interesting work on attention slips (for exceptions see Cheyne, Carriere, & Smilek, 2006; Robertson, 2003; Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997). Second, subjective reports are useful in that they can provide important insights into differences in cognitive behaviour across individuals. A good example of this use of subjective reports is provided by the pioneering work of Broadbent and colleagues (Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, & Parkes, 1982). Broadbent et al. developed the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) to measure individual differences in failures of perception, memory, and attention. They found that the peoples’ CFQ scores are relatively stable over long periods of time and that people with high CFQ scores (i.e. highly prone to cognitive failures) are more vulnerable to showing negative effects in stressful situations. Third, subjective reports can reveal the types of cognitive strategies people are trying to implement in various situations. This can help investigators gain insight into how participants may be performing their tasks and, in doing so, gain new insights into their data. A good example appears in Marcel’s (1983) classic exploration of unconscious influences of briefly presented stimuli. Based on the subjective reports of his participants, Marcel was able to divide his participants into those that were passive viewers and those that used active strategies. The results showed that the strength of the unconscious influence of a briefly presented stimulus was greater when the participants passively view the displays, as opposed to when they actively looked for the stimulus (for similar demonstrations see Smilek, Enns, Eastwood, & Merikle, 2006; Snodgrass, Shevrin, & Kopka, 1993; Van Selst & Merikle, 1993). Finally, subjective reports can be useful for helping to generate experimental hypotheses. Consider, for instance, recent studies of grapheme-colour synaesthesia, a condition in which achromatic letters and numbers automatically elicit specific and consistent colour experiences (Dixon, Smilek, Cudahy, & Merikle, 2000; Mattingley, Rich, Yelland, & Bradshaw, 2001). Because synaesthesia is principally a subjective condition, defined by an unusual conscious experience, the majority of the studies investigating this condition are motivated or based on the subjective reports of the synaesthetes (see Smilek & Dixon, 2002). In addition to noting the utility of measuring subjective experience, we wish to highlight that first-person reports of subjective experience and third-person measures of object behaviour can be integrated in a complementary fashion, dovetailing with the personal and subpersonal levels of explanation outlined previously. In this way, first- and third-person measures can be combined in a synergistic way so that they mutually constrain and support our understandings of cognitive performance both in real-world and lab-based settings. Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Cognitive Ethology and the future Based on the foregoing considerations, we wish to make several recommendations for future studies of cognition. We formulate these recommendations as an alternative approach to the study of cognition; we have referred to this alternative as Cognitive Ethology. The primary goal of this approach is to understand the functioning of human cognition in the real world. This approach is based on the following important assumptions:

(1) Invariance: The dynamics of cognition are, at least in part, contextualized. Variability in cognitive processing that arises from contextual differences is important to understand. Only by explaining such variability will meaningful and stable cognitive processes be discovered. (2) Control: Important insights into cognition will be gained when individuals behave in an unconstrained and uncontrolled manner in their natural environments. The goal is to measure naturally occurring variance rather than the variance that emerges from controlling the system. (3) Cognition as a distributed system: Cognition is a non-linear systemic process. Important aspects of cognition will only emerge when embodied individuals are considered as a part of a system that involves their natural environment (including other individuals). (4) Subjective reports: Subjective reports provide a direct measure of people’s conscious experiences, goals, intentions, and beliefs pertaining to their attentional behaviour in everyday environments.

The Cognitive Ethology approach also makes the following recommendations for future studies of cognition:

(1) The initial job of the researcher is to observe and describe what people do in the real world in order to specify the domain of inquiry. Such observation should be undertaken in a systematic empirical manner – rather than ‘arm chair observing’. These observations will form a much needed description of cognition as it operates in real-world settings. (2) The conceptual language used to describe human cognition should, initially, be grounded in the concepts and language that are used by people in their everyday life. (3) Studies of human cognition should integrate measures of both objective (third- person) behaviour as well as subjective (ﬁrst-person) experiences. First-person subjective reports should be combined in a mutually constraining fashion with third-person objective observations of behaviour.

Ultimately, Cognitive Ethology should be combined with other empirical approaches (e.g. laboratory-based neuroscience) in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of the functioning of human cognition. On the ﬁrst glance, it might appear to some that what we are proposing is simply a rehashing of older ideas. While we fully acknowledge that our notion of Cognitive Ethology is grounded in earlier thinking, we nevertheless believe that Cognitive Ethology represents a unique and critically important synthesis of previous ideas. To appreciate the uniqueness of what we call the Cognitive Ethology approach, it is helpful to contrast this approach with other research approaches that have emerged throughout the history of psychology, including: (a) information processing and cognitive neuroscience (Miller, 1956), (b) the ethological approach (e.g. Carthy, 1966; Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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Hutt & Hutt, 1970), (c) the ecological approach (e.g. Barker & Wright, 1955; Wright, 1967), and (d) Gibson’s (1950, 1979) ecological optics.

Information processing and cognitive neuroscience In the forgoing discussion, we have articulated how our Cognitive Ethology approach differs and is complementary with the common laboratory-based approach to studying cognition. This common approach to which we have been referring is a combination of the information-processing approach and the cognitive neuroscience approach. These approaches share in common with Cognitive Ethology the general goal of understanding human cognition and behaviour as it occurs in the real world. The difference between approaches arises when one considers the assumptions underlying the research strategies used to achieve this goal. At the heart of information processing and cognitive neuroscience are the assumptions of invariance and control that we have articulated earlier. As noted above, the Cognitive Ethology approach rejects these assumptions. The information-processing and cognitive neuroscience approaches seek to provide a subpersonal explanation of behaviour, whereas Cognitive Ethology seeks to also provide an explanation of behaviour at the personal level. Finally, unlike information processing and cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive Ethology places a strong emphasis on peoples’ subjective reports and personal insights into their performance.

The ethological approach This approach, which gained prominence during the 1960s, focuses on describing behaviour patterns of humans and animals in their natural contexts (e.g. Carthy, 1966; see Hutt & Hutt, 1970 for a review). The focus on behaviour patterns in natural contexts gained prominence because it became apparent that classical behaviourism failed miserably in certain instances when applied beyond the laboratory (see Breland & Breland, 1961). Our approach and the classic ethological approach are similar in that they both seek to provide a detailed description of behaviour as organisms interact with and in their natural environment. Furthermore, both approaches consider it essential that natural behaviour be observed and described as it normally occurs rather than being modified or probed in artificially controlled settings. In fact, these similarities are what prompted us to include the term ‘ethology’ when giving a name to our approach. There are, however, several critical differences between the two approaches. The first and primary difference concerns one goal of our approach, which is to relate the observations to classically cognitive concepts such as attention and memory. Our approach views these cognitive concepts as being contextualized processes revealed by the interaction of an individual with his or her environment. In contrast, classical ethology focuses on overt behaviour (i.e. generating an ethogram as a starting-point) and does not seek to draw inferences about cognition. The second difference between the approaches concerns the role of subjective reports. An important defining characteristic of the ethological approach it that it rejects inferences about subjective experience as well as the validity of subjective reports, insisting that behaviour be described without inferring intention, motivation, and cognition to an animal (Carthy, 1966; Hutt & Hutt, 1970). In contrast, our approach considers participants’ subjective reports and beliefs to be critical for understanding cognition and behaviour. The third difference between the approaches concerns the balance in emphasis between the behaviour on the one hand and the environment on the other. Unlike the ethological Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

334 Alan Kingstone et al. emphasis on behaviour over environmental situation, our approach seeks to take a more balanced focus on individual behaviour and situational factors. Finally, our approach is not committed to several issues central to classical ethology, such as how behaviour might be shaped by evolutionary pressures and whether behaviours are innate or learned.

The ecological approach Another approach which bears some similarity to Cognitive Ethology is the ecological approach (e.g. Barker & Wright, 1955; Wright, 1967; see Hutt & Hutt, 1970 for a review). This approach seeks to understand how the environment (i.e. ‘habitat’) relates to, or determines, behaviour. The critical similarity between the ecological approach and Cognitive Ethology pertains to the idea that characterizing situations is essential for understanding human behaviour. However, there are several important differences. One important difference between approaches involves the relative amount of emphasis placed on the environment and individual (see Hutt & Hutt, 1970). Speciﬁcally, the ecological approach emphasizes the role of the environment over the role of the individual. In contrast, our approach does not wish to allow the environment to overshadow either the individual or his/her behaviour. Another important difference between approaches pertains to the role of subjective reports and personal insights of the participants. In particular, the ecological approach limits the discussion of mental states (or ‘attitudes’) to those inferred from observable behaviour and does not recognize subjective reports as important and valid data. In contrast, Cognitive Ethology considers subjective reports and observable behaviour to be equally important.

Ecological optics Gibson’s (1950, 1979) ecological optics is based on the idea that perception is driven by the structure of the environment. According to Gibson (1959, p. 459), ‘perception is a function of stimulation and stimulation is a function of the environment’. This implies that perception is directly a function of the environment. Because of this strong emphasis on the environment as a determinant of perception, the framework is essentially ecological. The similarities between Cognitive Ethology and Gibson’s ecological optics are many. First, both approaches agree that cognitive concepts cannot be properly understood without considering the fact that participants are embedded in an environment and that cognition is not independent of the environment. Second, both approaches reject the assumption of stability. Gibson believed that the problem with traditional psychophysics was that it focused on how the sensory receptors respond to discreet stable stimulation. Gibson observed that ‘the stimulation of receptors and the presumed sensations ::: are variable and changing in the extreme, unless they are controlled in the laboratory’ (Gibson, 1966, p. 3). This keen observation, which also implied a limitation of laboratory studies, formed the basis for the critical idea that change across time and situations must be understood and integrated within a theoretical framework (see Gibson, 1959, p. 464–465). We agree with Gibson that the initial research focus should be on naturally occurring variability rather than variability that is controlled, eliminated, manipulated, or created in the laboratory. There are, however, at least three critical differences between Cognitive Ethology and Gibson’s ecological optics. First, whereas Gibson’s framework emphasizes the Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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role of environment with minimal or no consideration of the characteristics of the individual, Cognitive Ethology places equal emphasis on the characteristics of the individual and those of the situation. A second difference pertains to the use of introspection and participants’ subjective reports. Consistent with a greater focus on the environment than the individual, Gibson believed that introspection is only a means of generating hypotheses and did not consider subjective reports to be important data in their own right. Gibson writes: ‘introspection, however unbiased, is no more than a guide to the study of perception’ (Gibson, 1959, p. 461). In contrast, and as we have emphasized, Cognitive Ethology considers subjective insights as important data in their own right and seeks to ground cognitive concepts in people’s everyday understanding of those concepts. The third important difference between the approaches concerns the types of cognitive phenomena they seek to explain. Gibson’s theory provides a theory about the point of ‘contact’ between the sense organs and an ‘energy ﬂux’ in the world. Thus, perception was explained in terms of a basic stimulus structure such as the ‘optical texture in the array of light’. It is difﬁcult to see how such a level of explanation could ever provide insights into more complex human behaviour. Cognitive Ethology, on the other hand, seeks to directly address the ‘higher level’ aspects of cognition that are beyond the scope of Gibson’s ecological optics. In some sense, Cognitive Ethology takes off where Gibson’s theory ends.

Common objections to Cognitive Ethology When discussing Cognitive Ethology with our colleagues, we have noticed several common issues or objections that have been raised. Here we address four main concerns that have been brought to our attention.

(1) How does Cognitive Ethology go beyond previous calls for more ecologically valid research? Cognitive Ethology extends previous calls for ecological validity in at least two important ways. First, by articulating the principles of lab-based research and their alternatives (e.g. laboratory vs. naturalistic research, personal vs. subpersonal levels of explanation, subjective vs. objective measures, experiment vs. folk grounding of concepts) we have gone substantially beyond previous calls for more ecological validity in psychological research (Neisser, 1976; Kingstone et al., 2003). Indeed, our discussion of the principles underlying laboratory studies and their alternatives suggests a possible reason why previous exhortations for ecological validity have not taken hold. Our speculation is that, while seeking to be more ecological, researchers have maintained a laboratory-based subpersonal focus. In doing so, they adhered to assumptions (e.g. invariance and control) that are, at the core, incompatible with the ecological goal. This has resulted in the general view that ecological validity is something that cannot be attained and has created a degree of resignation to, and comfort with, artiﬁcial laboratory studies. We believe that the incompatibility between ecological goals and the underlying research assumptions may have gone largely unnoticed because the assumptions and their implications for ecological validity have not been clearly articulated. We hope that this paper will help to provide some clarity in this regard and also afﬁrm that ecological validity can, and indeed should, be attained using the personal-level real-world approach that we outlined. Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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(2) Does the Cognitive Ethology framework suggest that cognition should not be studied in laboratory settings? The short answer to this question is ‘no’. Laboratory studies of cognition can certainly contribute to our understanding of human cognition. However, it is our proposal that laboratory studies are not likely to provide accurate understandings unless they are ﬁrst grounded in systematic observations of how cognition operates in real-world settings. The goal of Cognitive Ethology is to provide the much needed body of observations on the basis of which existing laboratory ﬁndings can be validated and future laboratory experiments can be grounded. Ultimately, we believe that studies based on the Cognitive Ethology approach, and laboratory studies ranging from psychophysics to the cognitive neuroscience, can be combined in a complementary fashion and, in doing so, will lead to a much clearer and accurate understanding of human cognition in the real world.

(3) Is Cognitive Ethology just another name for human factors engineering or applied psychology? Cognitive Ethology is related yet distinct from human factors engineering and applied psychology. The primary goal of human factors engineering is to create or spawn new technology (see Vicente, 2003). Similarly, applied psychology seeks to solve speciﬁc real-world problems. In contrast to these approaches, Cognitive Ethology is not directly interested in solving a problem in the real world or in generating new technological innovations, though one would hope that such innovations would certainly emerge from this line of research. Rather, Cognitive Ethology focuses on what is typically referred to as ‘basic research’ in that it seeks to understand human behaviour for the sake of having a better understanding and not for a direct application or technological innovation. Thus, as opposed to human factors engineering and applied research, at times Cognitive Ethology investigations might focus on issues that do not have an immediately apparent or direct application.

(4) The Cognitive Ethology approach will not work because it is impossible to sufficiently control all extraneous variables in real-world settings This is perhaps the most common objection raised against studying cognition in the real world. And, it is a main reason why researchers have gone further and further into their laboratories and have studied cognition in highly controlled paradigms (e.g. Broadbent, 1971; Posner, 1978). We argue, however, that the concern that human cognition cannot be studied in real-world settings, because it is not possible to control naturally occurring variability, is misguided. Though it is clearly the case that it is difficult (if not impossible) to run a controlled experiment in natural settings, it is worth noting that such controlled experiments are only one part of the whole scientific enterprise. Many branches of science, such as biology and physics, have been based on decades, if not centuries, of systematic observation and description of naturally occurring events. In these sciences, experimentation may only occur after years of systematic observation. And, in some sciences, such as astronomy, observation and description remain the only way of doing research. Placed in the context of other research domains, it seems rather absurd that experimental psychology in general, and cognitive research in particular, has not conducted systematic observations or descriptions of their area of inquiry (see Koch, 1999). Psychology is unique in that it has, almost from its inception, been handed the experimental method without a clear Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society

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description of its subject matter. It is precisely this void in observation and description of naturally occurring cognitive phenomena that Cognitive Ethology can ﬁll. Cognitive Ethology seeks to observe and measure the naturally occurring variability related to cognition in real-world settings in order to lay the foundational observations on which theories and experimentation can be built.

Concluding comments Given the many considerations that have been presented in this paper, some conclusions are obvious. First, experimental simplification of a real-world situation is a reasonable research tactic when it follows careful real-world investigation. Second, real-world and lab-based investigations are complementary, not competing, research approaches. Each offers a level of explanation that is outside the realm of the other, with personal-level explanations, including subjective reports, often providing the foundational answers to the big ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions that are central to investigations of cognitive phenomena. We have also noted that personal-level explanations also explain cognition as operating in service of an individual’s goals and needs as they interact with a continually changing environment. Third, the field needs fresh data that is drawn from real-world experiences and phenomena. We have identified research assumptions that embrace the principles of variance and situation, which we propose will help advance the field in its quest to understand and predict real-world cognition and behaviour. Fourth, and finally, we have outlined a new research approach, called Cognitive Ethology, that makes concrete our ideas and which we hope will serve as a useful tool for our colleagues’ future research efforts. We look forward to the constructive dialogue that this article will stimulate and the other novel research approaches that will be borne from these efforts.

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Received 12 March 2007; revised version received 9 October 2007