The goal of cognitive ethology is to research and describe human cognition as it occurs in real-world situations. Taking cognitive research away from the isolation of the laboratory allows researchers to develop a richer understanding of cognition.
Unlike traditional lab-based work, cognitive ethology is not based on the assumptions of process stability and laboratory control. Rather, it focuses on describing human cognition as it occurs in the real world. The focus is on observation and description of human behavior and personal subjective reports, as people engage in naturalistic tasks. All too often researchers have buried their heads in the sand and assumed that real-world observation wasn’t necessary to support the theories developed in the laboratory. Furthermore, even when acknowledging the problem inherent in this way of thinking, it has often been the case that recognition of the problem is the only action taken; that is, researchers acknowledge the problem but then act as though they don’t really need to worry about it.
Occasionally, investigators like Donald Broadbent and Ulric Neisser have tried a third response. They acknowledged that cognitive processes change with situational changes and worked hard to bring the implications of this fact to the awareness of others. Perhaps their only mistake was to trust that the next generation of researchers would take their words to heart and try to find a solution to the issue. In hindsight, this faith has proven to be grossly misplaced, as the next generation of researchers have adopted one of the pathological responses of the past and grounded their neuroimaging investigations on the false assumption that cognitive processes are invariant across
situations. (Kingstone, Smilek, & Eastwood, 2008, p. 318)
As cognitive ethologists we try to adopt a reasonable blend of lab-based and real-world research in order to respect both the need for tight experimental control and the need for realistic application of research to people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, whereas human cognition has typically been studied without much regard to the brain that produces it, and neuroscience has typically studied the brain as though it operates in isolation from the rest of the body, the goal of cognitive ethology is to blend together all these elements and instead try to understand cognition as the product of a complete human body, operating in conjunction with the demands and affordances of its natural environment.
References
Kingstone, A., Smilek, D., & Eastwood, J. D. (2008). Cognitive Ethology: A new approach for studying human cognition. British Journal of Psychology, 99, 317–340. doi: 10.1348/000712607X251243