Research

My earlier work in psychological science was in human memory, more specifically, working memory (e.g., Gupta, Lipinski, Aktunc, 2005) and I also did graduate work in neurobiology of learning and memory, specifically maze learning and reward processing. While doing graduate research at Iowa, I began being seriously interested in the philosophical and methodological issues that arise in psychological science, which led me to pursue a doctoral degree in science studies focusing on philosophy of science.

I got my Ph.D. from the Science and Technology Studies program at Virginia Tech where I wrote my dissertation under the supervision of Professor Deborah Mayo. My dissertation is entitled “Experimental Knowledge in Cognitive Neuroscience: Evidence, Errors, and Inference” and it focuses on the epistemology of functional neuroimaging. I addressed essential questions, such as 'what can we really learn from cognitive neuroscience?', and analyzed the logic, epistemology, and the statistics of functional neuroimaging experiments. A central aspect of my work was applying Deborah Mayo’s error-statistical philosophy of science to issues of evidence and inference that arise in this field with the aim of clarifying and hopefully helping resolve these issues. Specific themes included carrying out historical and conceptual analyses of elements of neuroimaging; such as the physical and physiological bases of the workings of neuroimaging machines, statistical analysis techniques, and the inferential relationships between hypotheses about human cognition and neuroimaging data.

In my dissertation, I also introduced and formulated a useful, or productive, kind of theory-ladenness focusing on experimental and methodological knowledge in fMRI research. Further development and expansion of my doctoral work can be seen in Aktunc (2014; 2021).

My more recent empirical work in cognitive psychology was on inductive reasoning in which I conducted a series of experiments employing different versions of Wason's rule discovery task expanded to include informal error rates and uncertainty reduction feedback (Aktunc et al., 2021). In another series of experiments, we explored the possibility of meaningful task-related interpretations long response times in this task.

Most recently, I have started a new series of experiments on symbolic cognition. In these experiments, I explore accuracy and response time differences in the processing of words and different types of symbols.