Abstract Concepts Require Concrete Models: Why Cognitive Scientists Have Not Yet Embraced Nonlinearly Coupled, Dynamical, Self-Organized Critical, Synergistic, Scale-Free, Exquisitely Context-Sensitive, Interaction-Dominant, Multifractal, Interdependent Brain-Body-Niche Systems

  1. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers1,
  2. Han L. J. van der Maas1,
  3. Simon Farrell2

Article first published online: 24 OCT 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2011.01164.x

Issue

Topics in Cognitive Science

Topics in Cognitive Science

Volume 4, Issue 1, pages 87–93, January 2012

Additional Information

How to Cite

Wagenmakers, E.-J., van der Maas, H. L. J. and Farrell, S. (2012), Abstract Concepts Require Concrete Models: Why Cognitive Scientists Have Not Yet Embraced Nonlinearly Coupled, Dynamical, Self-Organized Critical, Synergistic, Scale-Free, Exquisitely Context-Sensitive, Interaction-Dominant, Multifractal, Interdependent Brain-Body-Niche Systems. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4: 87–93. doi: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2011.01164.x

Author Information

  1. 1

    Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam

  2. 2

    School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol

*should be sent to Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Weesperplein 4, 1018 XA Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: ej.wagenmakers@gmail.com

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 17 JAN 2012
  2. Article first published online: 24 OCT 2011
  3. Received 3 March 2011; accepted 3 March 2011

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Keywords:

  • Nonlinear dynamical systems;
  • Formal model;
  • 1/f noise

Abstract

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The complex-systems approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches.

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