Back to the Spectrum: How Schooled Contexts Shape What Cognitive Science Measures

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of how formal schooling functions as a powerful cognitive ecology shaping what cognitive science measures and theorizes. Drawing on developmental, cognitive, and educational research, it argues that many widely used experimental tasks and performance norms presuppose skills cultivated through institutionalized schooling, such as test familiarity, decontextualized instruction-following, and abstract symbolic reasoning. As a result, findings derived from schooled populations are often treated as species-typical cognition, obscuring the contextual conditions under which these cognitive phenomena emerge. Rather than rejecting existing empirical work, the paper calls for a more precise accounting of schooling as an active developmental context that organizes attention, memory, reasoning, and self-regulation. By reframing schooling as a cognitive ecology rather than a background variable, this analysis highlights the limits of overgeneralization in cognitive science and proposes a broader framework for interpreting cognitive measures across diverse developmental environments.