Cognitive Ethology for humans: inconvenient truth or attentional deficit?

In their target article ‘Cognitive Ethology: A new approach for studying human cognition’, Kingstone, Smilek, and Eastwood (2008) remind us that it is important for cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists to keep asking whether their studies in the laboratory capture how humans think and act in their natural habitat. This reminder seems well warranted. When asking fellow researchers from these fields about their topics of research, one often gets answers like ‘I study the Simon effect’ or ‘I study inhibition of return (IOR)’. And indeed, this is what people do. This indicates that certain experimental paradigms are perceived as worth studying in their own right. Kingstone and colleagues rightly point out that we cannot simply assume that results obtained in tasks that are convenient for the researcher generalize to more complex real-life situations. They propose a new ‘recipe’ for studying cognition: researchers should systematically observe people’s behaviour in the real world to identify relevant phenomena of study, relying on concepts prevalent in everyday life. From these observations, controlled laboratory studies should be derived that combine subjective and objective measures, as the integration of subjective reports and third-person observation provides more meaningful evidence than using each of these measures alone. We are sympathetic to this approach and agree that certain areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as attention research, could benefit from (shall we say) paying more attention to real-world phenomena. However, we do not agree with the authors’ assessment that there is a general ‘pathological’ response in the field or that people have ignored this issue. Rather, over the last 20 years, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience have seen increased interest