Rethinking the basic-applied dichotomy

Fig. 1 The “standard model” of basic and applied research Editor in Chief: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI) is a new journal with ambitions. Not only do we want to publish first-rate cognitive research, we want to change the standard way that our discipline thinks about basic and applied research. The standard view is dichotomous: Is your research basic, fundamental, and pure or applied, translational, and practical? We know about dichotomies in our trade. Remember when you learned about the nature-nurture debate? The topic might have been intelligence or mental illness, and the question was framed in terms of whether this attribute of our lives was due to our genetic endowment or to what we had learned in the world. Some cases were reasonably clear: eye color — nature; memory for the names of U.S. Republican presidential candidates — nurture. However, for the more interesting cases, we learned soon enough that the correct answer is almost never nature or nurture; it is both. Having gotten that question right on the midterm, we moved on to a discussion of how much of intelligence or mental illness or whatever can be attributed to genes and how much to environment. Eye color and Republican candidates’ names hold down the two ends of a nature-nurture continuum, but where is something like intelligence on that continuum? The press and the Internet are fond of this exercise. “Thank your parents if you are smart,” says the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail, because “up to 40 % of a child’s intelligence is inherited.” What does such a claim mean? The article does go on to say that this is an estimate of how much variance is explained by genetics. Interestingly, these discussions of apportioning variance tend to stick with the main effects and never discuss the interaction term in this implicit two-way analysis of variance, though much of the action presumably lies in that interaction term. So, is your research “basic” or “applied”? It is possible that your latest paper describes work that could be