Copyright @ The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society 317 British Journal of Psychology (2008), 99, 317-340 2008 The British Psychological Society The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk Cognitive Ethology: A new approach for studying human cognition Alan Kingstone '*, Daniel Smilek2 and John D. Eastwoods 'Department 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: alan.kingstone@ubc.ca). DOI:10.1348/000712607X251243
Copyright @ The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society 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)