Abstract
Classical accounts of the History of Science describe the development of theoretical models and the paradigms used to test them as reciprocal moves in an orderly feedback process in which top-down theory-driven testing alternates with bottom-up data-driven theory revision (Popper, 1959; Toulmin, 1958; Hebb, 1980). The efforts of experimental cognitive psychologists to explain the effects of drugs or of stressors on human performance clearly do not fit this neat reciprocity. Here theoretical “models” seem to follow rather than preceed empirical demonstrations of “effects”. Worse, it is often very obscure what “models” for the effects of stress on human performance actually describe. Most current models only describe performance on a single experimental paradigm. Few attempt to document the effects of a single stressor or drug across paradigms (cf, Poulton, 1970), and even the most comprehensive and insightful attempts to attain generality (eg Broadbent, 1971) have been reduced by missing or contradictory data to descriptive taxonomies of effects.
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© 1986 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Rabbitt, P. (1986). Models and Paradigms in the Study of Stress Effects. In: Hockey, G.R.J., Gaillard, A.W.K., Coles, M.G.H. (eds) Energetics and Human Information Processing. NATO ASI Series, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4448-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4448-0_11
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