We argue that scientific psychology's twin foci on biology (person) and process can benefit from a broadening. Specifically, we show that including two additional foci—context and time—can add explanatory leverage to both the design and interpretation of scientific studies. We focus on research on intellectual development to illustrate our points. First, we briefly describe each of the four factors (person, process, context, and time), and we review studies that focus on each individual factor and its role in intellectual development. Next, we review studies that focus simultaneously on multiple factors. We illustrate how multifactor approaches reveal fine-grained differentiations that are not reducible to single factors. Finally, we describe a study that considers simultaneously all four factors, and we show how omitting any one of these factors from the design and analysis changes the interpretation of the data.
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