Breaking the Fourth Wall of Cognitive Science

TLDR

Cognitive science experiments often separate participants from stimuli, limiting the generalizability of findings about social attention. The authors review evidence that conclusions about social attention drawn in laboratory settings do not generalize to natural contexts. They survey recent studies and advocate for more naturalistic experimental designs to better capture the dual function of gaze in authentic social situations.

Abstract

Research in cognitive science typically places a boundary between participants and the stimuli they are asked to process. While this separation affords experimental control, it can also severely limit the generalizability of the conclusions that are drawn. Here, we review new evidence that some conclusions that have been drawn about social attention do not extend beyond the laboratory. They fundamentally misrepresent how social attention operates in natural social contexts. Critically, these difficulties have led to renewed interest in the dual function of gaze—when in authentic social situations, the eyes both collect information from the environment (an encoding function) and communicate one’s mental states to others (a signaling function)—which traditional social-attention paradigms arguably have failed to capture. We review this recent work and discuss the utility of adopting more naturalistic methods in cognitive science.