"complicate our understanding" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it whenever you are trying to express that something makes it more difficult to understand a particular concept or idea. For example: "The addition of further variables to the equation only served to complicate our understanding of the phenomenon."
Comorbidities complicate our understanding of childhood asthma and its risk factors.
In the meantime, other Chinese citizens abroad have helped to complicate our understanding of democracy by osmosis.
Interactions between genes and environmental factors may complicate our understanding of the relative influence of both effects on PTB.
Does this complicate our understanding of Land's character, that a man who has endured random pain and cruelty would seek to cause it?
If these impish confidence tricks complicate our understanding of translation, they also alter our understanding of what constitutes an original poem.
These idiosyncracies are revealing but they dramatically complicate our understanding of gait, making it impossible for biomechanicists to agree on the fundamental properties of gait.
This talk explores Eichler's nearly two dozen experiments in multifamily housing and suggests how the firm's efforts complicate our understandings of how innovation in housing happens.
In fact, such insights can deepen and complicate our understandings of what people expect and receive from pornography.
I think that's both smart and necessary, but it further complicates our understanding of the tradeoff and makes it harder for us to understand what the Fed is up to (remember when they blew by their erstwhile 6.5% unemployment target?).
Complicating our understanding of antagonism online, networked social movements now routinely leverage public emotions for political ends.
He complicates our understanding of the evolution of racial and ethnic identity in America…" the MacArthur bio says.
