Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 15, 2025

Author Spotlight: A Novel Setup to Conduct Naturalistic Laboratory Experiments with Real Human Actors in Scenarios
Published on: August 4, 2023
Mapping cognition across lab and daily life using Experience-Sampling
Louis Chitiz1, Bronte Mckeown1, Bridget Mulholland1
1Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Abstract:
The goal of psychological research is to understand behaviour in daily life. Although lab studies provide the control necessary to identify cognitive mechanisms behind behaviour, how these controlled situations generalise to activities in daily life remains unclear. Experience-sampling provides useful descriptions of cognition in the lab and real world and the current study examined how thought patterns generated by multidimensional experience-sampling (mDES) generalise across both contexts. We combined data from five published studies to generate a common 'thought-space' using data from the lab and daily life. This space represented data from both lab and daily life in an unbiased manner and grouped lab tasks and daily life activities with similar features (e.g., working in daily life was similar to working memory in the lab). Our study establishes mDES can map cognition from lab and daily life within a common space, allowing for more ecologically valid descriptions of cognition and behaviour.
Related Concept Videos
Cognitive Learning
E. C. Tolman's theory of purposive behavior emphasizes that much behavior is goal-directed. He argued that to understand behavior, we must look at the entire sequence of actions leading to a goal. For instance, high school students study hard, not just due to past reinforcement but also to achieve the goal of getting into a good college.
Tolman introduced the idea that behavior is influenced by...
Naturalistic Observations
Schemas
Cognitivism
Previously dominated by behaviorism, which prioritized observable behaviors and largely ignored mental processes, psychology transformed in the 1950s. Cognitive psychologists argue that understanding how we think and process...

