The Scholar-Practitioner Collaborations in the Field of Cognitive Neuro-Psychology

Abstract

I have completed a six-week internship as a research assistant at the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Lab, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This is a research centre that focuses on neuropsychology and schizophrenia patients especially. Therefore, my experiences of working at the Lab encouraged me to investigate the extent of contacts and collaborations between researchers and practitioners in the field. Four researchers at the Lab were surveyed. Overall, it was found that the current collaborations between researchers and practitioners in the field of cognitive neuro-psychology in mainland China is far from enough. Current collaborations are limited to doing research or paper writing to be more specific and a main possible reason may be the lack of understanding of each other’s situation or view-point as mentioned by the participants. This imperfect situation will be discussed in more details and some suggestions are given.