Research fellowship at the UvA Institute for Advanced Study

From March 2023 – March 2024, I will be part of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) of the University of Amsterdam as a research fellow. The mission of the IAS is to advance cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that addresses complex scientific and societal challenges. In my project, I will study what insights from other disciplines can cognitive neuroscience adopt to better deal with the so-called ‘measurement problem’.

The ‘measurement problem’ is a well-recognized problem in the social sciences concerning the conceptualisation, operationalization and measurement of the concept of inquiry. For instance, what counts as ‘religion’ in sociology or ‘unemployment’ in economics? While the measurement problem is recognized in psychology, the more recent discipline of cognitive neuroscience seems to underestimate the problem. This is surprising, because the inferences that can be drawn from neural data depend on the operationalization of phenomena from the social sciences – cognitive capacities in behavioural tasks.

The significance of the measurement problem in cognitive neuroscience is likely to be more visible when it is related to measurement problems in other scientific disciplines. Moreover, I expect there are valuable lessons to learn for cognitive neuroscience from the way other disciplines approach the measurement problem.

My fellowship kick-off lecture will take place April 4, 2023 (see here for more information).

You can watch my introduction video here: