A contemporary teen knows that to say "shut up" in the context of parents is to invite a reprimand, despite its common use to indicate pleasant surprise. For example, "I got an 'A'" "Shut up! You got an A?" As to how it is interpreted, human activity is generally context sensitive. For instance, is the new fence at a country's boarder useful to sustain good neighbors or is it a provocation? Although no one would deny the importance of context, the question of when it does its work remains open. Does context pre-prepare cognition for action, or does it play its role after the fact? If cognitive activity self-organizes to best anticipate idiosyncratic situations, for example, then context would have a primary, preparative function, and could be considered to be part of cognitive activity. The main problem with this hypothesis is that conventional methods of behavioral science are not designed to study idiosyncratic context effects.
Drs. Van Orden and Holden will approach the problem of context from the perspective of self -organization in the coordination of brain and body with the environment. This approach has proven to be a useful and reliable characterization of motor coordination, but self-organization is relatively less established as a hypothesis about cognition. As such, these intuitive hypotheses need to be fully fleshed out. With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Van Orden and Holden will develop and test methods to study whether context is constitutive of cognitive activity. This will require an expanded range of data that examine self-regulating phenomenon of self-organization, as well as new methods to better explore and reveal cognitive dynamics as self-organizing phenomena. Previously, the tools developed to study complex, fractal, nonlinear, dynamical systems had been described primarily in the research literatures in which they were employed. The project will include efforts to make new tools available to behavioral and cognitive scientists. For instance, Drs. Van Orden and Holden are two of four instructors who teach nonlinear methods in the context of an American Psychological Association Advanced Training Institute. The project includes collaboration between the University of Cincinnati and California State University, a DOE-certified Hispanic-serving institution that emphasizes undergraduate education. The project entails training and mentoring opportunities for groups not historically represented in the sciences. It is also one of the first projects in support of research at an interdisciplinary center for Cognition, Action & Perception at the University of Cincinnati.
