Just what are experimental
psychologists good for? Or perhaps more specifically, what are experimental
psychologists good for in the field of cognitive neuroscience? Although my non-psychologist
colleagues haven’t been blatant enough to ask me this question directly, they
have certainly alluded to it on many occasions. Indeed, experimental
psychologists themselves sometimes suffer from self-esteem issues. A PhD
student the other day commented to me that they had done psychology as an undergraduate,
but felt they should have done a ‘harder’ subject. Apparently, it would have
been easier to pick up psychology without formal tuition, compared to say brain
anatomy or the physics of MRI or the complexities of synaptic transmission. To
this I say poppycock.
Cognitive neuroscience is an
inherently multidisciplinary field. Physicists, medics, computer scientists,
mathematicians and, yes, experimental psychologists, rub shoulders with each
other on a daily basis. This allows for research that would never be possible
if people with such academic backgrounds were isolated. For example, carrying
out complex analyses of functional neuroimaging data acquired in specific
patient populations. The more mathematically minded are needed for pushing the
boundaries of analysis techniques, medics are needed for the patient
populations and psychologists are needed for experimental design and
interpretation of the results. Few would dispute this, but a common assumption is
that the ‘experimental design’ part is the easy bit. We’re interested in
memory, so let’s give them the memory component from a neuropsychological
battery, or a word list to memorise, and see what’s going on in the brain! Yay
brains! Interestingly, this argument doesn’t seem to apply in reverse. Although
many do it, you wouldn’t go around bragging that computer scientists and
physicists aren’t needed because analysing neuroimaging data is the easy bit,
you just use the default settings in SPM or FSL (or AFNI! Hello Americans!),
click some buttons, and hey presto – blobs on brains!
So is experimental design easy,
or is it easier to ‘pick up’ without formal tuition? You already know I’m going
to answer with a resounding NO. Learning how to design good, well controlled,
experiments is hard. It requires years of learning other people’s designs,
designing your own experiments, getting formal feedback on those designs,
running experiments, refining your previous designs and, importantly, pouring
over data. It is only by getting your hands dirty designing, running and
analysing experiments, within the structure of a formal supervision process,
that this skill can be appropriately learned (actually, it is never 'learned', you are always learning). So the next time someone makes a
back-handed remark about psychologists, stand up for yourself and your academic
background. No-one else is going to!
There is a beauty to experimental
design. Just as mathematicians see beauty in equations, I see beauty in experiments.
I imagine it is much the same as the beauty an engineer sees in their structural
designs, in that it is a mix of creativity and logic, of elegance and practical
necessity. You start with a problem, or a research question, and map out the
most obvious way to answer the question. You write it down. You look at what
you’ve scribbled and instantly see an issue. You think. You come up with a
solution. That introduces another unforeseen problem, so you change that. The
whole thing starts to get a bit complicated. You have an epiphany and see a
simpler means of getting at the same underlying issue. You tweak that further.
You repeat over and over until you are as close to happy as you will get. This
to me is the best bit of research in my field. The process excites me, as I get
closer to the final design and the possibility of answering a previously
unanswerable scientific question.
That is what experimental
psychologists are good for in a multidisciplinary subject such as cognitive
neuroscience. Clever experimental design, grounded in cognitive theory, that
gets to the core of the question any research endeavour into the brain choses
to ask.
