Distributed cognition
Encyclopedia
Distributed cognition is a psychological theory developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins
. Using insights from sociology
, cognitive science
, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf. cultural-historical psychology
) it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is a framework (not a method) that involves the coordination between individuals, artifacts and the environment. It has several key components:
In a sense, it expresses cognition as the process of information that occurs from interaction with symbols in the world. It considers and labels all phenomena responsible for this processing as ecological elements of a cognitive ecosystem. The ecosystem is the environment in which ecological elements assemble and interact in respect to a specific cognitive process. Cognition is then shaped by the transduction
of information across extended and embodied modalities, the representations formed as result of their interactions and the attentive distribution of those representations toward a cognitive goal.
Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.
This abstraction can be categorized into three distinct types of processes.
thought that social organization could be seen as cognition through a community
. He described the cognitive aspects of a society by looking at the present information and how it moves through the people in the society.
Daniel L. Schwartz (1978) proposed a distribution of cognition through culture and the distribution of beliefs across the members of a society.
In 1999, Gavriel Salomon
stated that there were two classes of distributive cognition: shared cognition and off-loading. Shared cognition is that which is shared among people through common activity such as conversation where there is a constant change of cognition based on the other person's responses. An example of off-loading would be using a calculator to do arithmetic
or a creating a grocery list when going shopping. In that sense, the cognitive duties are off-loaded to a material object.
, especially in relation to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and other computer-supported learning tools. Distributed cognition illustrates the process of interaction between people and technologies in order to determine how to best represent, store and provide access to digital resources and other artifacts.
Collaborative tagging on the World Wide Web
is one of the most recent developments in technological support for distributed cognition. Beginning in 2004 and quickly becoming a standard on websites, collaborative tagging allows users to upload or select materials (e.g. pictures, music files, texts, websites) and associate tags with these materials. Tags can be chosen freely, and are similar to keywords. Other users can then browse through tags; a click on a tag connects a user to similarly tagged materials. Tags furthermore enable tag cloud
s, which graphically represent the popularity of tags, demonstrating co-occurrence relations between tags and thus jump from one tag to another.
Distributed cognition can also be seen through cultures and communities. Learning certain habits or following certain traditions is seen as cognition distributed over a group of people. Exploring distributed cognition through community and culture is one way to understand how it may work.
With the new research that is emerging in this field, the overarching concept of distributed cognition enhances the understanding of interactions between humans, machines and environments.
The process of working out the answer requires not only the perception and thought of two people, it also requires the use of a tool (paper) to extend an individual's memory. So the intelligence is distributed, both between people, and a person and an object.
Another metaphor for distributed cognition would be a plane and the crew on it. It is not the cognitive performance and expertise of any one single person or machine that is important for our well being. It is the cognition that is distributed over the personnel, sensors, and machinery both in the plane and on the ground, including but not limited to the pilots and crew as a whole.
:
On cognitive science
:
Edwin Hutchins
Edwin Hutchins is a professor and former department head of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Hutchins is one of the main developers of distributed cognition....
. Using insights from sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf. cultural-historical psychology
Cultural-historical psychology
Cultural-historical psychology is a theory of psychology founded by Lev Vygotsky at the end of the 1920s and developed by his students and followers in...
) it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is a framework (not a method) that involves the coordination between individuals, artifacts and the environment. It has several key components:
- EmbodimentEmbodied cognitionPhilosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas,...
of information that is embedded in representations of interaction - Coordination of enactionEnactionEnaction is one of the possible ways of organizing knowledge and one of the forms of interaction with the world. The first definition of Enaction...
among embodied agents - Ecological contributions to a cognitive ecosystem
In a sense, it expresses cognition as the process of information that occurs from interaction with symbols in the world. It considers and labels all phenomena responsible for this processing as ecological elements of a cognitive ecosystem. The ecosystem is the environment in which ecological elements assemble and interact in respect to a specific cognitive process. Cognition is then shaped by the transduction
Transduction
Transduction is a mechanism whereby genetic material may be transferred from the genes of a bacterium to another bacterium. This may include the actual covalent-bonding of new genetic markers...
of information across extended and embodied modalities, the representations formed as result of their interactions and the attentive distribution of those representations toward a cognitive goal.
Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.
This abstraction can be categorized into three distinct types of processes.
- Cognitive processes may be distributed across the members of a social group.
- Cognitive processes may be distributed in the sense that the operation of the cognitive system involves coordination between internal and external (material or environmental) structure.
- Processes may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of related events.
Early research
John Milton RobertsJohn Milton Roberts
John M. Roberts was an American anthropologist who developed the field of expressive culture in a series of studies on games in culture, and published over 50 articles on these subjects. His complete list of publications can be found in the biography by Goodenough...
thought that social organization could be seen as cognition through a community
Community
The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...
. He described the cognitive aspects of a society by looking at the present information and how it moves through the people in the society.
Daniel L. Schwartz (1978) proposed a distribution of cognition through culture and the distribution of beliefs across the members of a society.
In 1999, Gavriel Salomon
Gavriel Salomon
Gavriel Salomon is an Israeli educational psychologist who has conducted research on cognition and instruction, in particular the cognitive effects of media's symbol systems, transfer of learning, and the design of cognitive tools and technology-afforded learning environments...
stated that there were two classes of distributive cognition: shared cognition and off-loading. Shared cognition is that which is shared among people through common activity such as conversation where there is a constant change of cognition based on the other person's responses. An example of off-loading would be using a calculator to do arithmetic
Arithmetic
Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...
or a creating a grocery list when going shopping. In that sense, the cognitive duties are off-loaded to a material object.
Applications
Distributed cognition as a theory of learning, i.e. one in which the development of knowledge is attributed to the system of thinking agents interacting dynamically with artifacts, has been widely applied in the field of distance learningDistance education
Distance education or distance learning is a field of education that focuses on teaching methods and technology with the aim of delivering teaching, often on an individual basis, to students who are not physically present in a traditional educational setting such as a classroom...
, especially in relation to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and other computer-supported learning tools. Distributed cognition illustrates the process of interaction between people and technologies in order to determine how to best represent, store and provide access to digital resources and other artifacts.
Collaborative tagging on the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
is one of the most recent developments in technological support for distributed cognition. Beginning in 2004 and quickly becoming a standard on websites, collaborative tagging allows users to upload or select materials (e.g. pictures, music files, texts, websites) and associate tags with these materials. Tags can be chosen freely, and are similar to keywords. Other users can then browse through tags; a click on a tag connects a user to similarly tagged materials. Tags furthermore enable tag cloud
Tag cloud
A tag cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. 'Tags' are usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color...
s, which graphically represent the popularity of tags, demonstrating co-occurrence relations between tags and thus jump from one tag to another.
Distributed cognition can also be seen through cultures and communities. Learning certain habits or following certain traditions is seen as cognition distributed over a group of people. Exploring distributed cognition through community and culture is one way to understand how it may work.
With the new research that is emerging in this field, the overarching concept of distributed cognition enhances the understanding of interactions between humans, machines and environments.
Metaphors and examples
Distributed cognition is seen when using paper and pencil to do a complicated arithmetic problem. The person doing the problem may talk with a friend to clarify the problem, and then must write the partial answers on the paper in order to be able to keep track of all the steps in the calculation. In this example, the parts of distributed cognition are seen in:- setting up the problem, in collaboration with another person,
- performing manipulation/arithmetic procedures, both in one's head and by writing down resulting partial answers.
The process of working out the answer requires not only the perception and thought of two people, it also requires the use of a tool (paper) to extend an individual's memory. So the intelligence is distributed, both between people, and a person and an object.
Another metaphor for distributed cognition would be a plane and the crew on it. It is not the cognitive performance and expertise of any one single person or machine that is important for our well being. It is the cognition that is distributed over the personnel, sensors, and machinery both in the plane and on the ground, including but not limited to the pilots and crew as a whole.
Quotes
On educational psychologyEducational psychology
Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Educational psychology is concerned with how students learn and develop, often focusing...
:
On cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
:
See also
- Activity theoryActivity theoryActivity theory is a psychological meta-theory, paradigm, or theoretical framework, with its roots in Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology. Its founders were Alexei N...
- Civic intelligenceCivic intelligenceCivic intelligence is an "intelligence" that is devoted to addressing public or civic issues. The term has been applied to individuals and to collective bodies, like organizations, institutions, or societies.-The concept:...
- Collaborative Innovation NetworksCollaborative Innovation NetworksA Collaborative Innovation Network, or CoIN, is a social construct used to describe innovative teams. It has been defined by the originator of the term, Peter Gloor as "a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by the Web to collaborate in achieving a common goal by...
- Collective intelligenceCollective intelligenceCollective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks....
- Distributed languageDistributed languageDistributed language represents an externalist perspective on human cognition. Instead of tracing communication to individual knowledge of a symbolic system, language-activity is taken to sustain the human world...
- Extended mindExtended mindThe Extended Mind is a book in the field of philosophy of mind edited by Richard Menary. It contains several papers by different philosophers....
- Collective consciousnessCollective consciousnessCollective consciousness was a term coined by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to refer to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society...
- List of thought processes
- Situated cognitionSituated cognitionSituated cognition poses that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts....
- Social cognitionSocial cognitionSocial cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
- Portal:thinking
Further reading
- Dror, I.E. & Harnad, S. (eds.) (2008). Cognition Distributed: How Cognitive Technology Extends Our Minds. (258 pp.) John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
- Gureckis, T.M. and Goldstone. R.L. (2006) "Thinking in Groups", Pragmatics and Cognition, 14 (2), 293-311.
- LaGrandeur, K. (1998). "Splicing Ourselves into the Machine: Electronic Communities, Systems Theory, and Composition Studies." ERIC, March, 1998: ED 410 563.
- Resnick, L, Levine, S. and Teasley, L., (Eds.), Perspectives of socially shared cognition (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological association, 1988).
- Ross, D., et al., (Eds.), Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual volition in social context (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007).