The Editor's Challenge: Cognitive Resources

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Background

The Editor’s Challenge: A new format

The Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Cognition launches a new series of Research Topics that are aiming to deepen our understanding of basic concepts underlying many empirical and theoretical approaches in cognitive psychology and the cognitive (neuro)sciences. The series will run under the heading The Editor’s Challenge and it is motivated by two observations:

First, the cognitive sciences/neurosciences have developed many interesting research paradigms and measurement techniques to collect behavioral and neural data from human participants. However, rather than building large, integrative theories connecting the empirical phenomena and providing a deeper insight into the workings of human cognition and action, the field continues to show strong centrifugal forces that create increasing numbers of areas, subareas, and highly specialized research communities (“bubbles”) with very little, if any communication between them. To strengthen centripetal forces and foster across-community discussion and theorizing, the Specialty Chief Editor would like to stimulate constructive controversies on central concepts that many approaches rely on. 

Second, even though few papers in our field do without a strong vocal interest in “mechanisms”, be they neural or functional, closer analyses reveal that there is actually extremely little progress in unraveling the mechanisms underlying human cognition and action. In fact, most theorizing can be considered either circular or tautological (e.g., attentional phenomena are “explained” by the having of a vaguely specified attentional system or brain area that has no other purpose than generating the phenomena: Hommel, 2020) or they merely categorize observations by using slightly more abstract labels (e.g., the Stroop effect is categorized as stimulus-response compatibility effect, which seems almost enough to “explain” it). To overcome this state of affairs, I would like to stimulate constructive controversies with the ambition to develop truly mechanistic theories that specify both cognitive structures and the processes operating on them.

Bernhard Hommel, Specialty Chief Editor of Cognition.


The first challenge: Cognitive resources

Many empirical and theoretical approaches in the cognitive sciences/neurosciences rely on the concept of cognitive resources. Selective attention and dual-task interference have been “explained” by resource limitations, thinking styles rely on the assumption that some cognitive processes are more resource-demanding than others, information integration is assumed to require precious cognitive resources, and so forth and so on.

And yet, no one knows what this resource is. Is it just a metaphor for something that we do not and can never really understand, or are we able to reveal its functional and/or neural basis? Is it just a shorthand for an emerging property of the dynamics of cognitive/neural processes and/or the interactions between competitive representations? How does that work, how do interactions deplete resources? Or does it really refer to some measurable “stuff” that is limited, like the amount of crosstalk/conflict between representations, sugar in the brain, dopamine, frequencies available for neural oscillations, or blood/energy? How can we measure this stuff, change its availability or dynamics? A truly mechanistic theory should offer testable assumptions about the structures/representations that are involved in embodying or generating resources and resource limitations, about the processes operating on these representations, and present a scenario explaining how the interactions between structure and process generate both resources and shortages thereof—at a level of detail that is open to empirical test and computational simulation. 

Such a scenario is unlikely to be developed overnight, but we would like to invite critical, ambitious, and courageous contributions of any kind, be they theoretical, conceptual, empirical, or computational, that provide important constraints for a better, truly mechanistic understanding of human cognitive resources. What are these resources, what do they stand for, where do they come from? Let us throw all the homunculi out and take the next step, ideally in a broad, constructive discussion that transcends common communication bubbles.

Bernhard Hommel and Gesine Dreisbach, Challenge Editors.

Keywords: editors challenge, cognitive resources

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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