[tonysdg]

I do research in engineering, not psychology, but if I had to guess: probably the same way a lot of engineering research comes about. You read the literature, see interesting results somewhere, and questions start to pop into your head based on the reading ("hey, that's cool! I wonder what would happen if...").

The tricky part becomes actually answering that question: designing an experiment to test a hypothesis is deceptively hard. In my area (computer engineering), often times the hardware or software to test your hypothesis does not exist, so you're left searching for analogues and work-arounds that emulate the desired behavior. I could easily see some of these experiments operating under a similar idea.