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As theories of situated cognition have been increasingly borne out in the literature, our current understanding of cognition is that it is dynamic and intimately tied to the situational context of the immediate environment. For instance, in the laboratory, participants have a tendency to attend to the location where a cartoon face is looking (Friesen & Kingstone, 1998; Friesen, Moore, & Kingstone, 2005), but very few individuals engage in that same looking behaviour when walking past a stranger in real life (Gallup et al., 2012a). Despite general agreement with the notion that changes in context often invoke changes to cognition and behaviour, decades of research in experimental psychology have been predicated on the assumption that cognition is supported by processes that remain stable across situations (Kingstone, Smilek, & Eastwood, 2008). In the current work, I take the position that when experiments are planned in a way that considers the embedded and situational nature of cognition and behaviour, one can move towards a richer and more thorough understanding of complex real world contexts. Indeed, the situated cognition framework as well as the related ‘nudge theory’ (i.e., the notion that behaviour can be dramatically influenced by subtle changes in context; Sunstein & Thaler, 2008), form the bedrock of my doctoral work. In Chapter 2, I illustrate how a situated approach to cognitive research results in a simple intervention that has important implications for waste management and environmental policy. In Chapter 3, I establish that subtle variations in context can modify the extent to which pro-social behaviours are displayed. In Chapters 4 and 5, I demonstrate that the presence of mobile phones (i.e., technology as situated cognition) is not always a neutral factor when it comes to performance on cognitive tasks. Across these four data chapters and seven empirical investigations, I demonstrate how consideration of the situated cognition framework carries important methodological implications and has the power to uncover cognitive and behavoural effects that may have otherwise been missed.

The Attentional Repulsion Effect (ARE) refers to the phenomenon whereby a central target consisting of two aligned lines is misperceived to be offset in the direction opposite a preceding peripheral visual event. The prevailing explanation is that the ARE results from a transient change in the visual receptive fields. In a series of three experiments, the present investigation tests and lends initial support to a different explanation: that the ARE arises from a comparison between different spatial reference frames. Without altering the task, we found that the ARE can be eliminated by simply introducing some trials where the top line is unambiguously located to the left or right of the bottom line. Changing the task from a directional to a non-directional one caused the classic ARE to disappear as well, although a new form of the ARE was discovered.