Radically Open Science: Shaping discursive accounts of cognition in experimental debrief

Building on previous work on experimental interactions (Edmonds & Greiffenhagen, 2020; Gibson, 2020; Wooffitt & Allistone, 2005), this study examined interactions during the debrief stage of a cognitive psychology experiment, designed to understand new language learning. Drawing on the audio-recordings of participant-experimenter interactions in a psychology laboratory, the analysis focused on a recurring theme where the experimenter asked the participants about their performance on experimental tasks. Through the lens of Discursive Psychology, an analysis of these exchanges revealed how participants account for their cognitive processes, such as learning and identifying patterns, in situated, conversational terms. These accounts foreground cognitive processes as observable phenomena within discourse and provide a complimentary perspective to traditional cognitive psychology.

This work advocates for a “radically” open science that makes visible the elements of the research process that typically go overlooked or unreported. The present study expands the scope of what counts as analysable data in experimental research by showing that the interactions that shape the experiment also offer valuable insights. The findings have implications both for the theoretical understanding of learning and for methodological practices within experimental psychology.