Mapping cognition across lab and daily life using experience-sampling

The goal of psychological research is to understand behaviour in daily life. Although lab studies provide the control necessary to identify cognitive mechanisms behind behaviour, how these controlled situations generalise to activities in daily life remains unclear. Experience-sampling provides useful descriptions of cognition in the lab and real world and the current study examined how thought patterns generated by multidimensional experience-sampling (mDES) generalise across both contexts. We combined data from five published studies to generate a common ‘thought-space’ using data from the lab and daily life. This space represented data from both lab and daily life in an unbiased manner and grouped lab tasks and daily life activities with similar features (e.g., working in daily life was similar to working memory in the lab). Our study establishes mDES can map cognition from lab and daily life within a common space, allowing for more ecologically valid descriptions of cognition and behaviour.