Saher Panjwani

Neuroscientists investigating the neural bases of cognition in health and disease increasingly face choices about how to structure their programs of research. On the one hand, they can pursue independent investigator-led disciplinary specific research projects and seek funding through traditional granting mechanisms. On the other, they can experiment with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations of varying scale and scope, applying for funding for multi-year milestone driven projects. Although team-based initiatives have become a prominent feature of the neuroscientific research landscape in recent years, relatively little is known about how scientists evaluate whether participation in them is worth pursuing. In this paper, we present findings from semi-structured interviews with 10 neuroscientists participating in the TRanslational Initiative to De-Risk NeuroTherapeutics (TRIDENT) that bear on this question. Drawing on Laudan’s distinction between the contexts of acceptance and pursuit and conceptual tools from decision theory to frame the empirical findings, we argue that scientists’ assessments of the pursuitworthiness of interdisciplinary collaboration are shaped not only by expectations about the epistemic benefits that such collaborations may potentially afford, but also by forms of experiential knowledge acquired through prior collaborative experiences. Three key themes emerge from the interviews. First, scientists explore team-based approaches to achieve emergent epistemic benefits that they do not regard as attainable through independent investigator-led disciplinary research. Second, positive and negative experiences occurring in the contexts of these explorations generate forms of experiential knowledge about the costs of interdisciplinary collaboration and the interpersonal dynamics that can facilitate and hinder its success. Third, scientists subsequently leverage this experiential knowledge to determine which future collaborations are worthy of pursuit. We conclude by situating our findings within the relevant philosophical literature on interdisciplinary collaboration, acknowledging the limitations of our study, and identifying some future directions for research.