1 Department of Psychology, University of Haifa.
2 The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBR), University of Haifa.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2019 Sep;14(5):841-859. doi: 10.1177/1745691619856350. Epub 2019 Aug 13.
Owing to advances in neuroimaging technology, the past couple of decades have witnessed a surge of research on brain mechanisms that underlie human cognition. Despite the immense development in cognitive neuroscience, the vast majority of neuroimaging experiments examine isolated agents carrying out artificial tasks in sensory and socially deprived environments. Thus, the understanding of the mechanisms of various domains in cognitive neuroscience, including social cognition and episodic memory, is sorely lacking. Here we focus on social and memory research as representatives of cognitive functions and propose that mainstream, lab-based experimental designs in these fields suffer from two fundamental limitations, pertaining to person-dependent and situation-dependent factors. The person-dependent factor addresses the issue of limiting the active role of the participants in lab-based paradigms that may interfere with their sense of agency and embodiment. The situation-dependent factor addresses the issue of the artificial decontextualized environment in most available paradigms. Building on recent findings showing that real-life as opposed to controlled experimental paradigms involve different mechanisms, we argue that adopting a real-life approach may radically change our understanding of brain and behavior. Therefore, we advocate in favor of a paradigm shift toward a nonreductionist approach, exploiting portable technology in semicontrolled environments, to explore behavior in real life.
由于神经影像学技术的进步，过去几十年见证了对人类认知基础的大脑机制的研究热潮。尽管认知神经科学取得了巨大的发展，但绝大多数神经影像学实验都在感官和社会剥夺的环境中研究孤立的执行人为任务的个体。因此，包括社会认知和情景记忆在内的认知神经科学各个领域的机制理解严重不足。在这里，我们将社会和记忆研究作为认知功能的代表，并提出这些领域的主流、基于实验室的实验设计存在两个基本局限性，涉及依赖于个体和依赖于情境的因素。依赖于个体的因素涉及到在实验室范式中限制参与者的积极作用的问题，这可能会干扰他们的主体感和体现感。依赖于情境的因素涉及到大多数现有范式中人为去情境化的环境的问题。基于最近的研究结果表明，与受控实验范式相比，现实生活涉及不同的机制，我们认为，采用现实生活的方法可能会从根本上改变我们对大脑和行为的理解。因此，我们主张向非还原主义方法转变，利用便携式技术在半受控环境中探索现实生活中的行为。
