Ecological Validity

Abstract

This chapter discusses the need for ecologically valid neuropsychological assessments. First, there is a review of Neiser and Banaji’s debate about whether the laboratory imposes an artificial situation that does not represent the everyday world. In the years that followed, neuropsychologists attempted to offer a definition of ecological validity that was specific to neuropsychology. This definition included ideas of verisimilitude and veridicality. Recently, Burgess et al. (2006) argued for a “function-led approach” to models and assessments that proceed backward from a directly observable everyday behavior to measure the ways in which a set of actions lead to a given behavior in normal and disrupted processing. The function-led approach is contrasted with traditional construct-driven assessments that were borrowed from nonclinical studies and measure abstract cognitive constructs. This chapter presents the reader with Goldberg’s (2000) contention that existing neuropsychological procedures assess veridical, but not agent-centered, decision making, which limits the tests’ ecological validity because most real-life decision making is agent-centered and adaptive, rather than veridical. Next, there is a discussion of potential enhancements to ecological validity via the inclusion of the interplay of “cold” cognitive processing of relatively abstract, context-free information, and “hot” cognitive processing involved when emotionally laden information.

And it then becomes necessary to point out that there is something else–a ‘truthlikeness’ or ‘verisimilitude’–with a calculus totally different from the calculus of probability with which it seems to have been confused.

—Karl Popper (p. 219)

Whilst traditional tests of executive function have been remarkably useful, we are now at the stage in the development of the field where one could create bespoke tests specifically intended for clinical applications rather than adapting procedures emerging from purely experimental investigations, as has been almost exclusively the case until recently.

—Burgess et al. (2006, p. 194)

Reason is and ought to be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office save to serve and obey them.

—David Hume (1739/1978, p. 415)