The ECON – ECOlogical Neuroscience – Lab is led by Matthieu de Wit, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience. It is housed in the Neuroscience Department at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA, about an hour north of Philadelphia and ninety minutes west of New York City.
Our research focuses on the contributions of the brain to perception, action, and cognition in human beings, and, as such, can be classified as cognitive neuroscience. However, there is a twist to our way of doing neuroscience. Rather than building on cognitive psychology, as is typical in cognitive neuroscience, we take the approach known as ecological psychology as our starting point. As ecological neuroscientists, we study brain-behavior relationships in a wider context than is typical in cognitive neuroscience, incorporating analyses of the body (e.g., physiology, morphology, movement) and the environment (e.g., ecological information), and often using more naturalistic tasks (e.g., affordance actualization). We believe that this novel approach will lead to a more robust and broadly applicable understanding of the contributions of the brain to behavior and cognition.
To get a bit more specific about the neural side of our research, we study the brain at the level of brain regions and systems of regions, and, following from our wide contextual approach, ask whether these are best described as networks of functionally diverse, reusable neural resources within larger self-organizing brain-body-environment systems, or rather as networks of functionally specialized neural modules under central neural control, as has traditionally been assumed in cognitive neuroscience.
Practically speaking, in our current projects we instruct research participants to actively engage with (augmented reality) stimuli, while we manipulate bodily activity, and indirectly (with dual tasking) or directly (with fNIRS) characterize the brain activity accompanying their behavior. fNIRS is similar to fMRI but has the advantage that it does not require participants to remain immobile during brain imaging.
Our 2017 paper in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews can be seen as a manifesto for the lab. To learn about ecological neuroscience more broadly, take a look at this 2019 special issue in the journal Ecological Psychology, which was co-edited by Matthieu. A book chapter forthcoming in 2024 describes the most recent iteration of our conceptual and empirical approach.
A concrete example of a research project can be found on this poster, which was presented by three former student lab members at the 2020 Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference.
The ECON Lab 