Figure 1.

Contextualizing cognitive neuroscience

Can traditional research stimuli be used to understand contextualized cognition?

(A) Artificial visual search displays (upper left) are often used to study the neural basis of visual attention (“find the red –”). It is unclear, however, if or how neural mechanisms involved in artificial visual search are similarly implicated in searching for objects in natural scenes (e.g. bicyclists in the upper right).

(B) The lexical decision task (lower left) is used to study the neural basis of language understanding. The link with language understanding in the real world (e.g. when reading a book, lower right) is not clear. The crucial question is whether the brain processes investigated with decontextualized paradigms (left) can be translated to contextualized settings (right). In the paper, we argue that the cognitive and neural processes involved in contextualized cognition can be qualitatively different than those in decontextualized cognition. Brain icon from Flaticon.com