Distributed Cognition - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 20
About This Presentation
Title:

Distributed Cognition

Description:

Cognition is not just in the head; cognition is distributed over other people and tools ... Figure out who's going to do what (social-organizational analysis) ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:288
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 21
Provided by: kathryn45
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Distributed Cognition


1
Distributed Cognition
  • Kathryn Summers
  • Fall 2003

2
Distributed cognition
  • Cognition is not just in the head cognition is
    distributed over other people and tools
  • Looking at cognition as processes acting upon
    representations
  • Not within an individual, but through
    interactions among a number of human actors and
    technological devices for a given activity.

3
Background
  • Developed by Ed Hutchins and colleagues at
    University California, San Diego in the mid to
    late 80s
  • Based on cognitive sciences, cognitive
    anthropology, and social sciences
  • Contrast to traditional view of cognition as a
    localised phenomenon, information processing at
    the level of the individual.

4
Who does it
  • Believers
  • Sociocultural and educational psychologists
  • Cognitive scientists
  • User researchers
  • Us
  • Clearly of major significance for studying the web

5
Quotes from Believers
  • "people think in conjunction and partnership with
    others and with the help of culturally provided
    tools and implements"
  • (Salomon, G. (1993a). Editor's introduction. In
    G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions.
    Psychological and educational considerations (pp.
    xi-xxi). NY Cambridge University Press, p.
    xiii).
  • "the emphasis on finding and describing
    'knowledge structures' that are somewhere
    'inside' the individual encourages us to overlook
    the fact that human cognition is always situated
    in a complex sociocultural world and cannot be
    unaffected by it"
  • Hutchins, E., 1995b, p. xiii

6
How cognition is distributed
  • a cognitive process can be distributed among
  • an actor and the environment
  • external representations (artifacts)
  • among many actors
  • co-located in a shared physical space
  • Not co-located

7
Why its cognition
  • Computation as realized through creation,
    transformation, propagation or representational
    states
  • Looking at representations
  • Transformation of representations
  • movement of representations (informational flows)
  • Cognitionall the processes by which sensory
    input is transformed, stored, reduced, recovered,
    used

8
Cognitive activities
  • Representations get created, transformed,
    propagated
  • representations can be inside individuals or
    outside individuals
  • Internal mediamemory
  • External mediamaps, charts, database, scribbles,
    etc.
  • The states of the representation reflect how
    resources of knowledge and information are
    transformed

9
Reasons for distributed cognition
  • single actor can't perform a complex task alone
  • single actor doesnt know enough to accomplish
    the task
  • distributed, overlapping knowledge is less
    vulnerable, as the organization can survive when
    one or some actors are absent
  • more opportunities to discover and correct errors.

10
Assumptions and properties
  • cognitive systems consisting of more than one
    individual have cognitive properties that differ
    from those of individuals that participate in
    those systems.
  • knowledge possessed by members of the cognitive
    system is both highly variable and redundant.
  • Individuals possess different kinds of knowledge
    they interact in order to pool resources
  • access to information in the cognitive system is
    distributed, affecting coordination of
    expectations, which then become the basis of
    coordinated action.

11
Examplelearning to read
  • Cognitive processes distributed among teacher,
    pupil, other students, and the cultural artifacts
    involved
  • The expected future state, mature reading, must
    somehow be present at the beginning of
    instruction as constraints enabling the
    development of the to-be-acquired new system of
    mediation, mature reading" (p. 23).
  • "the combined child-adult system...can coordinate
    the child's act of reading before the child can
    accomplish this activity for him-her self" (p.
    24).
  • Cole, M. Engestrom, Y. (1993). A
    cultural-historical approach to distributed
    cognition. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed
    cognitions. Psychological and educational
    considerations (pp. 1-46). NY Cambridge
    University Press.

12
Cognitive artifacts
  • Cognitive artifacts, if useful, quickly become
    invisible elements of our experiential world
    (p. 53)
  • "these tools literally carry intelligence in
    them, in that they represent some individual's or
    some communities decision that the means thus
    offered should be reified, made stable, as a
    quasi permanent form, for the use by others" (p.
    53).
  • "as such tools become invisible, it becomes
    harder to see them as bearing intelligence
    instead we see intelligence as residing in the
    individual mind using the tools" (p. 53).

13
Cognitive artifacts
  • Reduce memory load
  • Simplify cognitive effort (cognitive offloading)
  • Trace changes (over time space)
  • They dont amplify human cognition they change
    the cognitive task

14
Cognitive artifacts
  • "Rather than amplify the cognitive abilities of
    the task performers or act as intelligent agents
    in interaction with them, these tools transform
    the task the person has to do by representing it
    in a domain where the answer or the path to the
    solution is apparent" (p. 155).
  • "the existence of such a wide variety of
    specialized tools and techniques is evidence of a
    good deal of cultural elaboration directed toward
    avoiding algebraic reasoning and arithmetic" (p.
    155).
  • Hutchins, E. (1995a). Cognition in the wild.
    Cambridge, Massachusetts MIT press.

15
Why distributed cognition is important
  • "if we ascribe to individual minds in isolation
    the properties of systems that are actually
    composed of individuals manipulating systems of
    cultural artifacts, then we have attributed to
    individual minds a process that they do not
    necessarily have, and we have failed to ask about
    the processes they actually must have in order to
    manipulate the artifacts. This sort of
    attribution is a serious but frequently committed
    error" (p. 173).
  • Hutchins, E. (1995a). Cognition in the wild.
    Cambridge, Massachusetts MIT press.

16
How we do it--methods
  • detailed analysis of video and audio recordings
    of real life events
  • neural network simulations and laboratory
    experiments.
  • Field work
  • observing the work
  • making copious field notes
  • recording events
  • transcribing and encoding events
  • Data analysis and re-representation focuses on
    the changes in representational state in the
    cognitive system.

17
Levels of analysis
  • processes of an individual
  • an individual in coordination with a set of tools
  • a group of individuals in interaction with each
    other and a set of tools.

18
Cognitive work analysis
  • Figure out the system (analyze work domain)
  • Figure out the tasks (what are the control tasks
    that emerge from work situations and that
    transform inputs into outputscurrent state/
    targets into decisions/actions)
  • Figure out strategies for control tasks
  • Figure out whos going to do what
    (social-organizational analysis)
  • Figure out the humans cognitive tasks (worker
    competencies analysis)

19
Ecological psychology
  • Tries to understand human perception and action
    as a response to environmental regularities
    (Gibson affordances)
  • How organisms perceive and respond to
    regularities in information

20
System-centered
  • Relevant if the underlying system is NOT
    malleable, while the potential urgency is high
  • Nuclear power plants, etc.
  • Help users understand the state of the system and
    respond appropriately
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com