Making Extra- and Intra-Disciplinary Collaboration Work

Making Extra- and Intra-Disciplinary Collaboration Work Isabel Gauthier (isabel.gauthier@vanderbilt.edu) Thomas J. Palmeri (tom.palmeri@vanderbilt.edu) Psychology Department, Vanderbilt University 111 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203 USA Psychology Department, Vanderbilt University 111 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203 USA Christian Schunn (schunn@pitt.edu) John T. Bruer (bruer@jsmf.org) LRDC, University of Pittsburgh, LRDC 821 3939 O'Hara St, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA The James S. McDonnell Foundation, 1034 South Brentwood Blvd., Suite 1850 Saint Louis, MO 63117 USA James L. McClelland (jlm@psych.stanford.edu) Robert L. Goldstone (rgoldsto@indiana.edu) Department of Psychology and Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation, Stanford University, 344 Jordan Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 USA Psychology Department, Indiana University 1101 East Tenth Street Bloomington, IN 47405 Keywords: collaboration; funding; scientometrics; bibliometrics and in conducting productive interdisciplinary collaborative research in cognitive science. Thomas Palmeri will moderate this symposium. Introduction Cognitive science is inherently interdisciplinary. It brings together methodologies, tools, concepts, and data from philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, machine learning, psychology, neuroscience, and education to understand the nature of the human mind. Collaborative interdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly attractive (and perhaps unavoidable) as the questions being tackled become more complex. Moreover, there is a growing recognition of the value of multidisciplinary collaboration on the part of both federal and private funding agencies and, consequently, an escalating emphasis on supporting truly collaborative research. Despite all of this, scientists vary greatly in their experience with collaborations and opportunities are rare to discuss how to make the most of collaborations, what factors make collaborations work or not work, and how to measure the success or failure of collaborations. This symposium will examine successful models in which a number of scientists have bridged the extradisciplinary gap across disciplines and the intradisciplinary gap across methods and concepts within a discipline. We will turn an analytic lens on the value of collaborative networks and teams of researchers and will report on the logistic, social, and scientific processes that drive intellectual growth and research. We will also discuss how to measure collaboration and interdisciplinarity at both small and large scales. In a unique combination, the history of one collaborative group will be related from both the perspectives of the scientists and their funding agency. As such, this symposium examines collaborations as entities worthy of scientific study by cognitive scientists in and of themselves, collaborations as engines for novel interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, and measures of collaborative activities in cognitive science as data to be modeled and analyzed. One practical outcome of this symposium will be disseminating information of use to those interested in developing interdisciplinary collaborative grant proposals Avoiding Fault Lines in Interdisciplinary Collaboration Christian Schunn - LRDC, University of Pittsburgh The members of research groups can vary on many dimensions (e.g., discipline, location, gender, age, ethnicity). This diversity, when harnessed through good group processes (e.g., not the typical brainstorming protocol), can lead to increases in creativity. But when these dimensions correlate (e.g., female biologists at one university working with male engineers at another university), the potential for small problems turning quickly into large problems (often in the form of fault lines) is increased. Bringing together laboratory and field research from cognitive and social psychology of group collaboration in general and scientific collaboration in particular, I will discuss factors that are predictive of continuation and success in intra and interdisciplinary scientific research groups, including meeting frequency and meeting type, work allocation, mentoring structure, and other tasks processes. The Benefits of Interdisciplinarity: A Case Study James L. McClelland – Stanford University This talk will address the benefits of interdisciplinary engagement, drawing on examples from my own collaborations linking computational and experimental approaches to understanding human cognition and on others linking cognitive and neural levels of analysis. I will focus particularly on the process that led to the Complementary Learning Systems theory of memory, developed jointly with Bruce McNaughton and Randy O'Reilly. This interdisciplinary connection between my psychological and connectionist perspective and McNaughton's experimental neuroscience perspective provided the opportunity not only