Ten Simple Principles for an Ecological Approach to Cognitive Science

Even though increasing the ecological validity of experimental and theoretical research is seen as a worthy aim by many, progress over the decades has been limited. And so, despite 150 years of research, fundamental and applied, our scientific understanding of the human mind, brain and behavior in the wild remains fragmented. We argue that one root cause is a lack of clarity and consensus on what pursuing ecological validity would amount to. These make the goal ambiguous, which in turn leads to misconceptions and unhelpful dichotomies guiding the theoretical discussion and methodological developments -as opposed to an research programme in the Lakatosian sense. We then develop ten principles for an ecological approach to cognitive science that, taken together, would yield such an integrated research programme: one that is neither “lab based” nor “real-world”, neither “basic” nor “applied”, but properly ecological. The principles are first presented as logically independent statements (“axioms”) that allow you to evaluate the Ecological, Cognitive and Scientific credentials of research – be it a single experiment, a computational model, or even a fundamental theory or conceptual framework. We then show how they can be integrated into concrete recommendations that should be practically useful in planning experiments or developing theoretical models (“a positive heuristic”). Finally, we discuss how and why we as researchers all too often violate these principles.