Abstract

How might one study the complex processes of the mind? The method favored by early philosophers and psychologists was introspection. While introspection is still used today, perhaps the major source of evidence used by cognitive scientists to understand cognition is data collected from experiments in which subjects are engaged in some type of relevant task. While these data all come from some type of experiment, the methods differ widely, and, as we shall see, the type of method is strongly influenced by the area of inquiry.