Applying an individual-differences lens to understanding human cognition

Abstract

The study of human cognition has traditionally sought to identify contextual factors that affect how humans perceive, attend to, think or reason about, or remember information from the world around them. Typically, such factors are varied experimentally in laboratory studies. For example, it is well documented that humans fail to notice important visual information in their environment, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). Experimental studies have sought to identify the contextual factors that render individuals most susceptible to IB, by comparing IB rates in one experimental condition versus another. This is typical of the traditional approach to the scientific study of cognition in both cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which has relied upon theories and frameworks for analysing data that focus on levels of performance averaged across individuals. As a consequence, variation that is unique to particular individuals or groups is treated as nuisance variance. While this approach has important utility and much knowledge has been gained from it, it can obscure other important aspects of the phenomenon. For instance, even given the identical physical information, some individuals experience IB whereas others do not. Why? Can this variance be meaningfully explained by individual or group factors? These are the sorts of questions that are beginning to be addressed more commonly in the science of cognition, and this is why this Special Issue is a timely contribution.