title: 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.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ej.wagenmakers@gmail.com
authors.forename: Eric-Jan
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Wagenmakers
authors.forename: Han L J
authors.initials: HL
authors.lastname: van der Maas
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Farrell
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003071:Cognition; D019336:Cognitive Science / Q000379:methods*; D003142:Communication; D003243:Consciousness; D017709:Fractals; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D013060:Speech