Learning from history: the need for a synthetic approach to human cognition

Frontiers in Psychology

Bernhard Hommel¹ 

关键词: theory;    research;    attention;    analytical modeling;    synthetic;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01435

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

History does repeat itself if it comes to how cognitive science develops new research lines. Consider attention, one of the first experimentally researched psychological phenomenon. While William James still thought that “everyone knows what attention is,” it took us more than 100 years to learn that attention is actually not one coherent thing but falls into very different subfunctions, which again are subserved by various processes. It seems only natural that a young, developing scientific discipline needs some time to learn how to deal with phenomena, translate them into useful scientific concepts, and investigate the underlying mechanisms. And yet, we apparently did not learn much from this quest, as witnessed by the very similar developments in research on phenomena with a younger history. Developments showing the same problematic tendencies that have troubled attention research and slowed down its progress for/by many years. In the following, we shall try to capture the typical way new research lines develop—the analytical approach, as we call it, by using attention as an example. Then we focus on three pitfalls in this process that seem particularly difficult to circumvent and present an alternative research strategy—the synthetic approach.

【 授权许可】

CC BY