Overview
What We Do
The overall goal of the research conducted in the Dunbar Lab is to discover the underlying mechanisms involved in the ways we think, reason, solve problems, and create new ideas. We investigate reasoning using many different methods ranging from naturalistic studies to conducting controlled experiments in the cognitive laboratory. We are investigating the key mental mechanisms underlying analogy, causal reasoning, scientific reasoning and the creative mind. We are also investigating the ways that the brain is involved in thinking and reasoning using fMRI. By investigating thinking and reasoning in these different contexts we are able to provide new insights into the cognitive and brain-based mechanisms underlying human thinking. In particular, our investigations of scientists reasoning in their labs has enabled us to go beyond he myths of chance discovery, flash of insight, and the lone scientist toiling against the grain. Instead, we find scientists use well defined strategies for analogical reasoning and causal reasoning as well as group reasoning strategies. This research has implications for the way scientists are educated, science is taught, and theories of how scientists think, reason and make discoveries. How concepts are discovered and taught, particularly in the domain of science education. This research is providing new insights and models of basic cognitive processes involved in analogy, causal reasoning, induction, problem solving, group reasoning, conceptual change.The hallmark of my research conducted in the Dunbar lab is that we investigate higher-level cognition from multiple perspectives and use many different methodologies. The use of different converging methodologies makes it possible to propose models that are applicable across a wide variety of contexts and provide insights into the nature of what it means to be a sentient human being. We use a vast array of methods in the lab raging from asking people to think out loud as we tape and analyze their thought processes, to scanning students brains as they reason about a complex topic, to analyses of DNA as we attempt to unravel the compx interactions of the human mind and our genetic capabilities.