Though a merger between Brown's psychology and cognitive and linguistic sciences departments may be delayed as construction for their joint building is put off, the strategy of consolidating brain science programs mirrors a growing nationwide trend.
At many other universities, previously separated subdisciplines in the behavioral sciences are reuniting in order to pursue top-flight research that demands broader resources and expertise. In particular, the prominence of neuroscience and other biological, genetic and physiological approaches to studying behavior has led many researchers to reach across disciplinary borders in ways not previously thought to be productive or even possible.
"There is this excitement that is going to tie social and cognitive and developmental phenomena into all kinds of interesting findings in other sciences," said Alan Kraut, executive director of the Association for Psychological Science.
Recent years have seen the emergence of new cross-disciplinary fields like neuroeconomics and psychophysiology that many researchers have hailed as promising trajectories in behavioral research. But this trend has also changed the landscape of training, funding and departmental organization in the behavioral sciences in a way that not all researchers are happy about.
A major concern of some researchers is that the excitement about new neuroscientific and experimental methodology, though fruitful in some cases, may cause other strands of research to go by the wayside.
Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Pauline Jacobson, who described herself as Brown's "only straight theoretical linguist," said her discipline's departmental pairing with the cognitive sciences has been a "struggle" for researchers and students who are not interested in experimental approaches to studying language.
In 1986, amid a surge in the popularity of cognitive methodology in the behavioral sciences, Brown's psychology department split apart, said Jacobson, who has taught at Brown since 1975. Experimentally and cognitively inclined researchers joined the previously independent linguistics department. The merger made sense at the time, she said, but has had significant effects on the program's size and research emphases.
"As a result of the merger with cognitive science, the orientation became much more towards psycholinguistics and other kinds of experimental linguistics and some computational linguistics," Jacobson said. "The department has moved more in that direction and has lost some what we had as basic strengths in some of the more theoretical areas."
In 1986, the linguistics department had 25 graduate students, but now there are only two doctoral candidates in linguistics, Jacobson said. She said the department's emphasis on lab-based training has made it hard to attract researchers and students that do not do experimental research. She added that it is getting harder to get grants from the National Science Foundation, which she said is increasingly averse to funding non-experimental research like hers.
Kraut echoed this concern, but said that the trend in funding was a case of the "pendulum maybe swinging too far," and emphasized that there is still an important place for research in non-experimental fields of behavioral science.
Jacobson said that she was unsure about what implications the proposed merger between the psychology and cognitive and linguistic sciences departments would have for the opportunities to do linguistic research at Brown, but said she had "concern."
The "cognitive revolution" that originally induced a reshuffling of the departments at Brown in 1986 was part of a broader fracture within behavioral science departments across the country. Several psychology and anthropology departments split along the lines of those who valued cognitive approaches to behavior and those who did not.
More recent forays into interdisciplinary work in the behavioral sciences could be the "corrective" to the hasty, and in some cases counterproductive, cognitive revolution that occurred 20 years ago, said Nancy Dess, professor of psychology and psychobiology at Occidental College and president of the behavioral neuroscience and comparative psychology division of the American Psychological Association.
In some cases, as at Brown, such interdisciplinary work might be accompanied by the reunification of certain departments.
"You're seeing the reintegration of areas that have been split apart for various reasons for long periods of time, and I think that's a good thing," Dess said.
Dess said that the previous emphasis on cognition within psychology had often "gobbled up" other research areas, making it hard for non-cognitive researchers to get hired and receive funding. But that trend, Dess said, had little to do with neuroscience, which is now providing important insights into new areas of behavioral research.
The most significant driving force behind changes in the character of behavioral research, Dess said, is scholars' passion for applying new expertise to innovative questions - applying neuroscience to the study of social justice, for example. An increase in this type of research will likely have significant effects on how researchers prepare themselves to pursue their interests, she said.
"The social psychologists are going to have to learn some neuroscience, and the neuroscientists are going to have to be trained in social and cognitive psychology," she said.
Dess also noted that psychology tends to get less respect within the scientific community at large, and she suggested that psychologists' increased collaboration with neuroscientists could elevate the prestige of their discipline.
"I might not like that we got it that way, but I'll take it," Dess said.
