ArticleTopics in cognitive science2020
Pseudo-mechanistic Explanations in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.
Article in Topics in cognitive science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Uncertainty, Cognitive Control and Theta-Band Activity: A Relationship That Depends on Metacontrol Requirements.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- A Critical Perspective on Neural Mechanisms in Cognitive Neuroscience: Towards Unification.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Exorcizing the homunculus from ideomotor/simulation theory: a commentary on Bach et al. (2022), Frank et al. (2023), and Rieger et al. (2023).Psychological research · 2024Review
- Imagery and motor learning: a special issue on the neurocognitive mechanisms of imagery and imagery practice of motor actions.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Theoretical psychology: discursive transformations and continuity in Psychological Research/Psychologische Forschung.Psychological research · 2022Article
- GOALIATH: a theory of goal-directed behavior.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Overcoming the phenomenological Perpetuum mobile in clinical cognitive neuroscience for the benefit of replicability in research and the societal view on mental disorders.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Trade-Off vs. Common Factor-Differentiating Resource-Based Explanations From Their Alternative.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Editorial: The editor's challenge: Cognitive resources.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Towards an Ideology-Free, Truly Mechanistic Health Psychology.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Levels of biological plausibility.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Building and Understanding the Minimal Self.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- On the Nature of Explanations Offered by Network Science: A Perspective From and for Practicing Neuroscientists.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Editors' Review and Introduction: Levels of Explanation in Cognitive Science: From Molecules to Culture.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Dual-Task Performance: Theoretical Analysis and an Event-Coding Account.Journal of cognition · 2020Article
- No one knows what attention is.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2019Review
- Social Cognition 2.0: Toward Mechanistic Theorizing.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Binary Theorizing Does Not Account for Action Control.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
Few articles in psychology and cognitive neuroscience do without the promise to get into the "mechanisms underlying" particular psychological phenomena. And yet the progress in our mechanistic understanding of human cognition and behavior must be considered disappointing: Most "explanations" merely classify the phenomenon under investigation as falling into a broader category of (not any better understood) phenomena, specify the context conditions under which the phenomenon is likely to occur, or specify a particular kind of neural activity (such as the activation of a particular brain area) that is correlated with the phenomenon. None of these meets the criteria of a truly mechanistic explanation, which needs to account for phenomena in terms of "a structure performing a function in virtue of its component parts, component operations, and their organization" (Bechtel, 2006). This contribution characterizes the problem and some of its implications and discusses possible solutions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.