‘It’s only through change that you can see what a thing actually is’

When and how did you become a psychologist?

I took it into my head at the age of 16 – for reasons I have no idea of really, especially not at this distance – that I wanted to study psychology at university. I became quite obsessed with the notion. My school would not allow me to apply to do psychology, because 'that's not a proper subject, Tolmie'. So I applied to various places to do English, but with an eye on switching to Psychology, and I ended up at Lancaster, where you did three subjects in the first year. I did English, but also Psychology and Philosophy. From day one, I knew I was right, and that it was the right place for me. How do you know these things? I'd picked up on something and thought, 'that's really interesting', intuitively.

About people, or the world, or…?

Yes, I think it was about understanding people… from a young age, I was probably quite good at observing people, making good inferences about their mental state and emotional states and responding appropriately. I can actually remember around that age, thinking that it was really important to be able to do that and to be responsive to people.

In order to…

… be helpful. I was brought up as a Catholic… not that I stayed in the faith past the age of about 12, but that leaves its mark. 

That desire to be helpful comes across in your association with the BPS, and the broader academic community. You're always looking to delve deeper and have an impact.

That's important, but it's a great deal about trying to facilitate things. The things that I've done workwise matter to me, but in a sense, they matter more because of what they might actually achieve. Science learning, I get passionate about that, because it's such an important thing for kids to be taught well. There's research activity, including road crossing. And I was the Director of our ESRC doctoral training partnership for eight years, and that was about facilitating the development of social science early career researchers. So yes, trying to facilitate positive developments is a big, very common thing for me. 

In terms of science learning, why do you think it has lagged behind literacy learning in terms of its status in schools?

There's a fair amount of work with science educators, but it's a different perspective, we're trying to get to the underpinning cognitive machinery of understanding science. We have very good models of how literacy development occurs, and why dyslexia occurs… still bits to fill in, but it's a solidly developed picture. Increasingly, that's true for maths as well. When students approach me to work in this area, I joke 'you do realise I'm one of only about half a dozen people in the world working in this area?' 

In the UK, that's particularly been because though science was part of the national curriculum, it stopped being assessed as a separate subject at primary school some years ago now. The already somewhat flaky tendency for primary schools in particular to teach science well, just went off a cliff. There was no great incentive for them to take it seriously. There are solid science teachers out there in primary schools, but there's also a lot of people who don't really understand it very well. They might see it as something to be got past, and it's not taught very well for most kids.

What does a good science teacher look like?

In terms of the things that we've been uncovering in our recent work, they are people who have a good understanding of the topics they're teaching, but they support children to actually engage with that for themselves. In particular, to think about it imaginatively. One of the big predictors of science achievement later, is understanding the mechanisms which underpin cause-and-effect relationships. Think about objects sinking in water, the competing forces that are at work there… it's about understanding the interplay between those forces. Understanding mechanisms is very strongly predictive of later science achievement, and also engagement with theorising about science. 

That's not something that most science teachers even know to encourage. You have to come at that through a process of imagination. The idea goes back to Jean Piaget in the Principles of Genetic Epistemology, where he talks about how cause and effect relationships are mostly invisible, you can't actually see what's going on, you have to construct a dynamic mental model in order to understand how cause connects to effect. These constructions seem to be very nonverbal in origin, and the way that seems to be most effective to promote them is to just get children to imagine what's going on. But of course, imagination and science are somehow seen as polar opposites.

Psychology is well placed to act as a hub science there: exploring and explaining those mechanisms underlying science in general?

Yes. So we've begun a journey here. There's still a lot that we don't understand – what enables some children to be good at creating these ideas, these dynamic representations, where others don't. It's partly to do with encouragement, of course, but it's also something to do with attention. The flow of events, temporal attention, is really central. I've got a PhD student, starting October, who's going to be doing more work on that.

Throughout my parenting, I've tried to foster scientific thinking, and I'm always amazed at how little I know. 'Dad, why is the sky blue?' I really should know this… umm, I'm going to have to Google it. And that's before we get into the realms of your background in Philosophy: that the sky isn't actually blue, there's no such thing as blue. 

One of your angles on learning is how the biological is transformed into the cultural. Is that right?

Yes, that's a good way of putting it. It's been an interesting journey for me. When I was a student, I was probably captured more by Piaget's work to start off with, but my third-year undergraduate class in developmental at Lancaster was taught by Andy Lock, who subsequently moved to New Zealand. Andy was a devoted Vygotskian, and he did a very good job of creating understanding around Vygotskian ideas, and that stayed with me – the social construction of meaning, and of behavioural sequences. Symbolically mediated, higher psychological processes, as he called them. 

My first postdoc, with Christine Howe at Strathclyde, focused on collaborative group work and the processes by which there would be an interplay between dialogue and cognition in terms of the development of children's understanding. That was very focal for me. At that stage, I was oriented towards the social side of this and what was happening externally to create cognition. Subsequently, when we were developing the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, I came to think more about how you can't discount the physical infrastructure of the brain in which this is actually happening. That was very much the Vygotskian perspective as well – how the biological becomes captured and enculturated for other use, but the biological doesn't go away. It's still there in terms of the fundamental systems. 

Of course, Vygotsky died so young, he never really got to look at the interplay between these things.

Luria, who he worked with, did try to investigate the relationships between the biological and the cultural. That has become very much where I am – interested in the neurocognitive processes that underpin learning, but also how that whole process is about symbolically mediated systems that have colonised aspects of neural function. But large parts of the neural function are completely untouched by this… as Michael Gazzaniga has said, only about 10 to 20 percent, of neural function is anything to do with those kinds of systems. There's huge amounts of activity which has nothing to do with symbolic systems, but could become so… that's what Vygotsky was talking about, that ultimately, maybe all of these processes are amenable to being captured symbolically. 

We've mentioned psychology as a hub discipline, and it occurs to me that developmental psychology is a hub within a hub – it connects to so many things. When I was an academic, I tended to get described as a developmental psychologist, just because my research involved children, but for me, there had to be more to it than that – some investigation of development and progression.

Again, it goes back to Vygotsky and his insistence on what he called the developmental perspective – it's only through change that you can see what a thing actually is. You have to take a developmental perspective. If you don't know where functions have come from, your understanding is poor. We understand much better what executive function is by looking at it developmentally because you can see something of how these capabilities might actually emerge.

That has led us to an interesting place where we've set up a lab to focus on this – the relationships between motor control and executive functions. This notion of executive functions as a solely cognitive capacity is way short of the mark. Evolutionarily, it was about control of behaviour, especially fine-grained control of behaviour. So we posit there's an intimate relationship between motor control and executive function. Only thinking about it developmentally would actually lead you to see that, both in terms of individual development but also, in evolutionary terms around how these functions emerge.

Does that lead you to embodied cognition, and involving motor functions in learning?

Yes. Angeline Lillard did some work about 10 years ago now, which found that executive functions seem better for pupils in Montessori schools, which place particular emphasis on developing motor skills. And now Louise Livingstone, who is a Montessori educator, is halfway through work on a PhD programme with myself and Rebecca Gordon comparing the development of motor skills and executive functioning in Montessori versus standard primary school children – using a longitudinal design, though, so we don't have any completed analysis yet. We're just going through the pre-registration process for that. 

It's presumably quite an exciting time to be involved in the Research Board, who are interested in all those issues around pre-registration, replication…?

Yes, absolutely. The BPS quite rightly developed an adherence to the policy statements on open data and things like that. I've been involved with the Research Board for a long time because I was chair of the editorial advisory group for a number of years. I've seen a lot of this process happen, and Daryl O'Connor was great at taking that forward. 

Now, probably most academic psychologists understand quite well the processes of open access publication, and difficulties such as article processing charges that go with that. There is a growing awareness of pre-registration and data sharing, though my experience is that it is still a relatively small percentage. Open sharing of materials is rarer still: people are somehow reluctant to hand on their carefully developed materials unless there's some acknowledgement for it. There's something to be tackled there.

These practices have got a solid toehold and there is generally an appreciation of the origins of the replication crisis in practices such as p hacking, data snooping, and generally reinventing why you did a study in order to make sense of the things that you actually found. Journals played into that by not wanting to accept papers with null results. So there's a growing awareness that open science is about more principled ways of doing science, how we should have been doing it all along.

Absolutely. 'A toehold' is an interesting way of describing it. And from a developmental perspective, it seems to me that the Open Science movement is to a certain extent relying on the older generation retiring and dying off, and the younger generation – who are hoped to be more on board with the more principled way of doing things – taking up the baton and really running with it to make it more mainstream. But the younger generation is just as impacted by the pressures on academic life as the people who've struggled with all these issues over the last 20-50 years. What it's going to take to get more than a toehold, and what role can the Research Board play in that?

There're two versions of what is pretty much the same story, at the departmental level for me here, and for the Research Board, addressing this across UK psychology. You're right, in the sense that there is some feeling that younger people are going to be more likely to engage with this. That is partly because this is about making use of technical systems, which older people might be a bit more resistant to. 

But in actual fact, it's the senior people now who need to be embracing this, because they are the ones who have the capability for making it work productively, and then being able to demonstrate to younger colleagues that this is an effective way of doing things. Relying on the younger members of departments to actually do this, without there being the capacity for mentoring, for instance, will run into problems. The pressures that people feel as early career researchers are only going to be alleviated by more senior colleagues appreciating these difficulties, getting on board and helping to manage them.

So we've been working here on developing a mentoring system – no great invention there, but it's the first time in any department I've been involved in that we've really taken it seriously and set up a system to manage it. It then becomes more of a shared journey into these practices – we've done a lot of talking about open science practice, but in a way that becomes part of the dialogue between mentors and mentees.

As far as the Research Board is concerned, yes, we need to be setting those examples. That was partly what Daryl was trying to do. But also, we've been engaging with other networks like the UK Reproducibility Network, to try to argue the case and set up resources to support the introduction of open science principles into undergraduate teaching. It's only when it becomes part of the furniture at the undergraduate level that it's going to feed forward. There's still a long way to go on that. The basic ideas are becoming embedded, but it's the actual practice.