Understanding how humans operate in the real-world, the ecological niche in which the brain has evolved, is critical to explaining the richness of human experiences. Most scientific knowledge about brain and behaviour, however, comes from laboratory studies focusing on a single domain (e.g., language processing) and sacrifice real-world context to achieve experimental control (e.g., recognition of isolated words rather than face-to-face communication).

At the other end of the spectrum, scholars studying real-world phenomena often sacrifice experimental control in order to conduct studies in naturalistic settings. Laboratory experiments, however, often have limited external validity, while naturalistic approaches are descriptive, and therefore do not address causal relationships between brain, behaviour and the environment.