Geoff Bird (2024).
EPS Mid-Career Award Lecture 2024. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
In this paper Geoff gives his thanks to those who have taken him through the steps of ‘fine cuts’ research that seeks to get past the superficials to what is really going on.
The field of psychology is going through a time of change. New technologies, like AI and big data, are allowing us to revolutionise how research is conducted. But it’s important to remember the fundamentals. That’s where the ‘fine cuts’ approach comes in.
An analogy: if you’re trying to understand how a motorbike works. You don’t look at it as a whole and say, “Well, it moves fast,” because that doesn’t tell you much. A ‘fine-cuts’ approach would be like dusting off the tools, examining the engine, and figuring out how each part interacts with the others to make the car go. In psychology, instead of bike parts, we’re looking at cognitive processes. These are the building blocks of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Traditional psychology research has often tried to study broad concepts, like empathy or face recognition, without breaking them down into smaller components.
Perhaps this has led to inaccurate or incomplete conclusions. We have not yet got into the nuts and bolts. Geoff’s ‘Fine cuts’ research argues that to truly understand these complex concepts, we need to study the individual processes that contribute to them.
This involves:
- Developing detailed, specific models of how these processes work. For example, instead of just saying “people with autism struggle with face recognition,” a fine-cuts model would specify which aspects of face processing (perception, matching, memory, categorisation) are of difficulty.
- Designing experiments that can isolate and measure these specific processes. This might happen in developing new tasks, like the CARER task which distinguishes between two parts of empathy: identifying someone’s emotions and how much you are feeling what they feel. Or research into face blindness that looks at face memory and face matching as two separate things.
This approach is leading to exciting new discoveries and challenging old assumptions. Research using the “fine cuts” approach has shown that:
- Teasing out emotional categorisation from recognition. By rapidly flashing pictures of emotional faces on different people with the occasional emotional ‘oddball’ of disgust, and reading neural activity it has been shown that people with alexithymia, not autism, struggle to recognise these emotional facial expressions.
- Theory of mind, a concept widely debated in psychology, might not be what we thought it was, or at least work the way we thought it did. A fine-cuts development of the Mind-space model suggests that our mental state guesses are based on both the situation we are in and who we are. An extrovert will have different thoughts at a party than an introvert, and in a negotiation, a suspicious person will have different thoughts than a trusting person. This needs testing differently, through the use of videos in which the ‘actor’ is not acting, but is asked about their mental states as they go along.
The ‘fine-cuts’ approach emphasizes the importance of careful, rigorous research in psychology. In a world of quick answers and flashy technology, it’s a reminder that sometimes the best way to understand something complex is to take a step back and examine the details.
