About Real-life cognition

Everyday cognition is a complex interplay of a large number of concurrent neural processes that handle an incredible amount of sensory inputs in order to generate appropriate responses to interact with the environment. It can be argued that solely studying any of these aspects of cognition in isolation, as is often the case in laboratory experiments, will yield an over-simplified or over-specialized understanding of the true nature of real-life cognition.

Naturalistic stimulation, interaction with real-world-like environments, or even field experiments have been used in the past to mitigate this problem. However, these approaches often come with methodological challenges, such as high costs, unavoidable confounds, and a comparably large amount of noise. Consequently, only a small fraction of the literature is concerned with aspects of complex everyday cognition.

The goal of this collection is to document applicable paradigms, available resources, and scientific findings that embrace this challenge on a conceptual and/or methodological level. It aims to serve as a platform for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas to move us closer to an understanding of the function of the brain as a whole, outside of conventional feature-deprived laboratory settings.