Distributed Cognition

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Distributed Cognition

• Kathryn Summers
• Fall 2009

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Cognitive artifacts

• Its easy for cognitive artifacts to become
  invisibleto think of cognition as happening in
  the person using using the artifact
• But, artifacts or tools are the result of past
  cognitionthey represent someones cognition made
  concrete and stable for repeated use or for use
  by others
• So you have to pay special attention to
  artifacts, to figure out what past cognition they
  represent, and how they transform or affect the
  cognitive experience of the artifact user

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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

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Related DisciplineEcological 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