Building Bridges from (Ivory) Towers: Combining Academia and Industry for Cognitive Research

This half-day workshop will discuss how to enrich research by marrying academic and industry-based work. Attendees will learn the theoretical, practical, and logistical complexities involved in advancing cognitive science across these distinct research sites. This topic is relevant to the cognitive community because academia and industry often have common goals but distinct capabilities. For example, academics have the freedom to study almost any quantifiable question, and typically run small-scale studies performed in highly controlled settings with limited sets of participants. This approach results in high internal validity, but low statistical confidence, external validity, and limited replicability. Industry researchers are also often interested in human behavior (that of their users or clients) but typically need to further a company’s business objectives with their work. However, these researchers have access to large-scale data sets and resources unmatched by the academic sector (Griffiths, 2014). This workshop will help attendees identify cases where cross-site collaborations might be useful, along with the methods necessary for carrying out such research.