How Do Psychology Professors View the Relation Between Scientific Knowledge and Its Applicability and Societal Relevance?

How do researchers in psychology view the relation between scientific knowledge, its applicability, and its societal relevance? Most research on psychological science and its benefits to society is discussed from a bird's eye view (a meta-scientific perspective), by identifying general trends such as psychology's dominant focus on lab-based experiments and general descriptive theories. In recent years, several critics have argued that this focus has come at the cost of reduced practical and societal relevance. In this study, we interviewed Dutch psychology professors to gauge their views about the relation between psychological research and its relevance to society. We found that psychology professors engaged in a variety of activities to engage science with society, from work in clinical and applied settings, to consultancy, education, and science communication. However, we found that the role of theory when applying scientific knowledge to practical problems is far from straightforward. While most participants regarded theories as relevant to understanding general contexts of application, psychological theories were seldom directly related to specific applications. We compare and discuss our findings in the light of recent discussions about the lack of applicability and societal relevance of psychological science.

Representative design: A realistic alternative to (systematic) integrative design.

We disagree with Almaatouq et al. that no realistic alternative exists to the "one-at-a-time" paradigm. Seventy years ago, Egon Brunswik introduced representative design, which offers a clear path to commensurability and generality. Almaatouq et al.'s integrative design cannot guarantee the external validity and generalizability of results which is sorely needed, while representative design tackles the problem head on.

Eye contact avoidance in crowds: A large wearable eye-tracking study.

Eye contact is essential for human interactions. We investigated whether humans are able to avoid eye contact while navigating crowds. At a science festival, we fitted 62 participants with a wearable eye tracker and instructed them to walk a route. Half of the participants were further instructed to avoid eye contact. We report that humans can flexibly allocate their gaze while navigating crowds and avoid eye contact primarily by orienting their head and eyes towards the floor. We discuss implications for crowd navigation and gaze behavior. In addition, we address a number of issues encountered in such field studies with regard to data quality, control of the environment, and participant adherence to instructions. We stress that methodological innovation and scientific progress are strongly interrelated.

The Reality of "Real-Life" Neuroscience: A Commentary on Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn (2019).

The main thrust of Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn's ecological approach is that "the use of real-life complex, dynamic, naturalistic stimuli provides a solid basis for understanding brain and behavior" (p. 851). Although we support the overall goal and objectives of Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn's approach to "real-life" neuroscience, their review refers to the terms "ecological validity" and "representative design" in a manner different from that originally introduced by Egon Brunswik. Our aim is to clarify Brunswik's original definitions and briefly explain how these concepts pertain to the larger problem of generalizability, not just for history's sake, but because we believe that a proper understanding of these concepts is important for researchers who want to understand human behavior and the brain in the context of everyday experience, and because Brunswik's original ideas may contribute to Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn's ecological approach. Finally, we argue that the popular and often misused concept of "ecological validity" is ill-formed, lacks specificity, and may even undermine the development of theoretically sound and tractable research.

Looking behavior and potential human interactions during locomotion.

As humans move through parts of their environment, they meet others that may or may not try to interact with them. Where do people look when they meet others? We had participants wearing an eye tracker walk through a university building. On the way, they encountered nine "walkers." Walkers were instructed to e.g. ignore the participant, greet him or her, or attempt to hand out a flyer. The participant's gaze was mostly directed to the currently relevant body parts of the walker. Thus, the participants gaze depended on the walker's action. Individual differences in participant's looking behavior were consistent across walkers. Participants who did not respond to the walker seemed to look less at that walker, although this difference was not statistically significant. We suggest that models of gaze allocation should take social motivation into account.

The 'Real-World Approach' and Its Problems: A Critique of the Term Ecological Validity.

A popular goal in psychological science is to understand human cognition and behavior in the 'real-world.' In contrast, researchers have typically conducted their research in experimental research settings, a.k.a. the 'psychologist's laboratory.' Critics have often questioned whether psychology's laboratory experiments permit generalizable results. This is known as the 'real-world or the lab'-dilemma. To bridge the gap between lab and life, many researchers have called for experiments with more 'ecological validity' to ensure that experiments more closely resemble and generalize to the 'real-world.' However, researchers seldom explain what they mean with this term, nor how more ecological validity should be achieved. In our opinion, the popular concept of ecological validity is ill-formed, lacks specificity, and falls short of addressing the problem of generalizability. To move beyond the 'real-world or the lab'-dilemma, we believe that researchers in psychological science should always specify the particular context of cognitive and behavioral functioning in which they are interested, instead of advocating that experiments should be more 'ecologically valid' in order to generalize to the 'real-world.' We believe this will be a more constructive way to uncover the context-specific and context-generic principles of cognition and behavior.

Implying social interaction and its influence on gaze behavior to the eyes.

Researchers have increasingly focused on how the potential for social interaction modulates basic processes of visual attention and gaze behavior. In this study, we investigated why people may experience social interaction and what factors contributed to their subjective experience. We furthermore investigated whether implying social interaction modulated gaze behavior to people's faces, specifically the eyes. To imply the potential for interaction, participants received either one of two instructions: 1) they would be presented with a person via a 'live' video-feed, or 2) they would be presented with a pre-recorded video clip of a person. Prior to the presentation, a confederate walked into a separate room to suggest to participants that (s)he was being positioned behind a webcam. In fact, all participants were presented with a pre-recorded clip. During the presentation, we measured participants' gaze behavior with an eye tracker, and after the presentation, participants were asked whether they believed that the confederate was 'live' or not, and, why they thought so. Participants varied greatly in their judgements about whether the confederate was 'live' or not. Analyses of gaze behavior revealed that a large subset of participants who received the live-instruction gazed less at the eyes of confederates compared with participants who received the pre-recorded-instruction. However, for both the live-instruction group and the pre-recorded instruction group, another subset of participants gazed predominantly at the eyes. The current findings may contribute to the development of experimental designs aimed to capture the interactive aspects of social cognition and visual attention.

Task-related gaze control in human crowd navigation.

Human crowds provide an interesting case for research on the perception of people. In this study, we investigate how visual information is acquired for (1) navigating human crowds and (2) seeking out social affordances in crowds by studying gaze behavior during human crowd navigation under different task instructions. Observers (n = 11) wore head-mounted eye-tracking glasses and walked two rounds through hallways containing walking crowds (n = 38) and static objects. For round one, observers were instructed to avoid collisions. For round two, observers furthermore had to indicate with a button press whether oncoming people made eye contact. Task performance (walking speed, absence of collisions) was similar across rounds. Fixation durations indicated that heads, bodies, objects, and walls maintained gaze comparably long. Only crowds in the distance maintained gaze relatively longer. We find no compelling evidence that human bodies and heads hold one's gaze more than objects while navigating crowds. When eye contact was assessed, heads were fixated more often and for a total longer duration, which came at the cost of looking at bodies. We conclude that gaze behavior in crowd navigation is task-dependent, and that not every fixation is strictly necessary for navigating crowds. When explicitly tasked with seeking out potential social affordances, gaze is modulated as a result. We discuss our findings in the light of current theories and models of gaze behavior. Furthermore, we show that in a head-mounted eye-tracking study, a large degree of experimental control can be maintained while many degrees of freedom on the side of the observer remain.

Gaze tracking accuracy in humans: One eye is sometimes better than two.

Most modern video eye trackers deliver binocular data. Many researchers take the average of the left and right eye signals (the version signal) to decrease the variable error (precision) up to a factor of [Formula: see text]. What happens to the systematic error (accuracy) if the left and right eye signals are averaged? To determine the systematic error, we conducted a calibration validation in two experiments (n= 79 and n = 64). The systematic error was computed for the left eye, right eye, and version signals separately. In respectively 29.5 and 25.8% of the participants, the systematic error of a single eye signal was lower than that of the version signal at the cost of a higher variable error. If a small variable error is desirable, and the difference between the left and the right eye is not the topic of study, one should average position data from the left and the right eye (in other words, use the version signal). If a small systematic error is desirable, one should use the signal (from left eye, right eye or version) that delivers the best accuracy. In the latter case, this may cause worse precision than that of the version signal.

Gaze allocation in face-to-face communication is affected primarily by task structure and social context, not stimulus-driven factors.

Gaze allocation to human faces has recently been shown to be greatly dependent on the social context. However, what has not been considered explicitly here, is how gaze allocation may be supportive of the specific task that individuals carry out. In the present study, we combined these two insights. We investigated (1) how gaze allocation to facial features in face-to-face communication is dependent on the task-structure and (2) how gaze allocation to facial features is dependent on the gaze behavior of an interacting partner. To this end, participants and a confederate were asked to converse, while their eye movements were monitored using a state-of-the-art dual eye-tracking system. This system is unique in that participants can look each other directly in the eyes. We report that gaze allocation depends on the sub-task being carried out (speaking vs. listening). Moreover, we show that a confederate's gaze shift away from the participants affects their gaze allocation more than a gaze shift towards them. In a second experiment, we show that this gaze-guidance effect is not primarily stimulus-driven. We assert that gaze guidance elicited by the confederate looking away is related to the participants' sub-task of monitoring the confederate for when they can begin speaking. This study exemplifies the importance of both task structure and social context for gaze allocation during face-to-face communication.