Cognition in The Wild
... First, distributed cognition explains how individuals never perform tasks in isolation, rather they conceptualize the performative in connection with other individuals and the material world (Hutchins, 1995). This approach describes how an action is conducted and thought of collectively, by offering a way to interpret the collective mechanisms that lead to the realisation of a joint action. ...
... He reveals how people in isolation cannot perform tasks by noting that every action always takes place concerning other individuals, the material world and in a complex, intersubjective process of coordination. Hutchins (1995) expands the unit of analysis for cognitive phenomena by introducing the collective dimension. Cognitive work is distributed among individuals between the elements of the material environment and over time (Hutchins, 2020). ...
... Distributed cognition facilitates the adoption of different units of analysis to describe a range of cognitive systems (Hutchins, 1995). This allows for the identification of a set of cognitive properties at each level of the description of a cognitive system. ...
This thesis addresses the conceptualisation of creativity within organisation studies. It contributes to practice-based processual approaches to organisational creativity (OC), a recent stream of literature that emphasises the temporal progression of activities as the basis of understanding the creative phenomenon from a practice-based perspective. To this end, the thesis explores professional practices in a theatre; an exciting field where the materiality of human and non-human bodies matter, and meanings and contents are negotiated in a complex creation process based on specific professional practices.
The thesis contributes to practice-based processual OC by mobilising the epistemology of practice as a theoretical framework for reconfiguring organisational creativity in practice. The epistemology of practice provides a frame for considering the processual, collective and material dimensions of OC. I show how creativity is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon where knowledge, power, performance and sociomaterial dimensions intersect in practice, to stimulate and produce creative emergence.
To deepen the analysis of the creative practices, I enrich the epistemology of practice with analytical concepts from the perspective of distributed cognition and Actor-Network Theory. In conversation with the epistemology of practice, these traditions deepen the distributed and sociomaterial dimensions of organisational creativity, offering additional tools for a more nuanced analysis of the phenomenon. This suggests going beyond the conceptualisation of creativity as the solving of a problem, and interpreting it instead as variant composition practices where relationships are tested, and chains of mediations are produced that generate innovative outcomes.
This dissertation is organised by way of an introduction and three publications that considered the same empirical case about the production of a theatre show for children, entitled “Ruote Rosa”. The production was written and directed by myself, and the empirical investigations were undertaken as a collaborative ethnography by myself and my co-author for the resultant publications.
Research findings demonstrate how the epistemology of practice, with distributed cognition and creativity, and ANT, expand the knowledge of practice-based processual OC, explaining it as a complex multidimensional phenomenon, where different elements meet in practice and give birth to creative emergence. The practical, tacit, sensible professional knowledge of the participants, the power dimension, the sociomateriality and the common orientation of the practice (object of practice), play together and intersect in the creative flow, stimulating and orienting the creative emergence. The thesis documents, and explains, how the dimensions follow each other in a chain of relations that move the process toward something shared and stable; the production of an artifact that, in this case, was a theatre show.
... Rather than focusing on outcomes defined from the start, we use cognitive-ethnographic methods to understand the social learning processes at work and immanent pedagogical aims and outcomes in laboratory practice. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by a significant body of related work in cognitive ethnography [7], [8], situated learning [9], [10], laboratory studies [11]- [15], and related approaches [16], [17]. ...
... It aims to understand, explain, or intervene in cognitive phenomena through detailed and refined analysis of ethnographic observation, digital photography, and video recordings. Hutchins argues for using cognitive ethnography to refine our understanding of how human cognition functions as "our folk and professional models of cognitive performance do not match what appears when cognition in the wild is examined carefully" [7]. Cognitive ethnography employs many of the same skills and practices as traditional ethnography, such as participant-observation, interviewing, and artifact analysis. ...
... Cognitive ethnography offers a pathway towards understanding the functional specification of human cognition at both the individual and distributed scales; in other words, the functional role that cognition plays in relation to the environment, technology, society, culture, ongoing practices and activities, goals and problems, etc. Thus, cognitive ethnography is increasingly employed for studying cognitive activities that are environmentally and culturally situated [9], [10], [34] and socially and technically distributed [7], [21], [22], [35], [36]. ...
... First, navigation is a complex behaviour based on a dynamic interplay of multiple cognitive components and mechanisms. This relies on information from different sensory cues, might involve creating and maintaining enduring and transient spatial representations (Wolbers & Hegarty, 2010), and might involve recruitment of external elements to enhance or constitute cognitive processes (Hutchins, 1995). However, many sensory cues available in the real world are absent from laboratory or virtual environments, questioning the usefulness of such situated studies. ...
... Notably, the entanglement of the environment with wayfinding processes accords with findings from the few studies in which wayfinding has been investigated outside the laboratory (e.g., Heft, 2013;Hutchins, 1995). For example , Hutchins' (1995) famous study of naval navigation, in which his cognitive ethnographic approach found that navigational processes were best understood as distributed across environmental structures, material artifacts, other crew members, and time. ...
... Notably, the entanglement of the environment with wayfinding processes accords with findings from the few studies in which wayfinding has been investigated outside the laboratory (e.g., Heft, 2013;Hutchins, 1995). For example , Hutchins' (1995) famous study of naval navigation, in which his cognitive ethnographic approach found that navigational processes were best understood as distributed across environmental structures, material artifacts, other crew members, and time. These findings accord with our wider conceptual concerns about the dominance of laboratorybased wayfinding research, and the cognitivist paradigm in which most of such research is conducted. ...
Wayfinding is generally understood as the process of purposefully navigating to distant and non-visible destinations. Within this broad framework, uninformed searching entails finding one’s way to a target destination, in an unfamiliar environment, with no knowledge of its location. Although a variety of search strategies have been previously reported, this research was largely conducted in the laboratory or virtual environments using simplistic and often non-realistic situations, raising questions about its ecological validity. In this study, we explored how extant findings on searching translate to a real-world environment, using a phenomenologically informed experiment. Our findings demonstrate a previously undescribed complex and dynamic interplay of different search strategies. Importantly, our results reveal that: (i) the presence of other people is importantly entangled with the process of searching; and (ii) people frequently probe and switch between search strategies based on local environmental characteristics. Together, our results reveal that search behaviour is critically dependent on environmental features and that searching in complex real-world settings should not be conceptualised as depending on a simple singular strategy. This raises questions about the dominance of laboratory-based experiments and their narrow cognitivist framework, highlighting the value of studying wayfinding in the real world.
... Youths on a math walk are constantly on-the-move (Marin et al., 2020), talking with each other and adult facilitators, watching short videos about mathematical concepts, taking their own photographs, and asking/refining their own mathematical questions. To understand mathematical reasoning in this dynamic and multi-modal environment, we ground ourselves in embodied (Abrahamson, 2019;Nathan, 2012;Goodwin, 2007) and situative (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989;Hutchins;1995;Greeno, 1998;Lave, 1988) perspectives on learning. ...
... Youths on a math walk are constantly on-the-move (Marin et al., 2020), talking with each other and adult facilitators, watching short videos about mathematical concepts, taking their own photographs, and asking/refining their own mathematical questions. To understand mathematical reasoning in this dynamic and multi-modal environment, we ground ourselves in embodied (Abrahamson, 2019;Nathan, 2012;Goodwin, 2007) and situative (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989;Hutchins;1995;Greeno, 1998;Lave, 1988) perspectives on learning. ...
Background: This comparative case study examined the use of math walks with middle grade youths and adult facilitators in an informal STEM learning space. Math walks are place-based walking tours where youths and facilitators critically examine and ask math-related questions about their environment.
Method: Drawing on situated theories of learning and frameworks for understanding group participation, we examined how facilitators constrained or supported youths' mathematical thinking as they participated in math walks at the local zoo.
Results: Using interaction and stance analysis, we identified, analyzed, and compared three contrasting cases: In the first case, the facilitator may have overly constrained youths' mathematical thinking by asking leading questions and not providing time for youths to discuss their personal interests. In the second case, the facilitator may have underly constrained youths' mathematical thinking by allowing youths to ask too many new questions without refining or developing any one specific question. In the third case, the facilitator supported mathematical thinking by praising youths' work, layering on mathematical terminology, and providing clear and actionable instructions for how youths could refine their mathematical questions.
Conclusions: Findings support efforts to understand how adult facilitators can support youths in seeing mathematics within and asking mathematical questions about the world around them.
... La idea central de esta propuesta, i.e., que muchos aspectos definitorios de la cognición humana son producidos por nuestro estar situados en un contexto sociocultural, ha sido expuesta ya en las ciencias cognitivas desde la perspectiva de la antropología (p. ej., Hutchins, 1995). La contribución del enfoque enactivo a esta perspectiva es una generalización de esta idea a un rango mucho más amplio de interacciones interindividuales. ...
... Por ejemplo, el impacto cognitivo de las prácticas socioculturales y de los objetos tecnológicos ya está siendo investigado sistemáticamente desde la perspectiva de la antropología de una manera que coincide estrechamente con los intereses del enfoque enactivo a la cognición social (p. ej., Hutchins, 1995). Es esencial fortalecer más estos nuevos vínculos interdisciplinarios. ...
Hay una pequeña, pero creciente, comunidad de investigadores que abarca un espectro de disciplinas unidas en su rechazo al aún dominante paradigma computacionalista en favor del enfoque enactivo. El marco teórico de este enfoque se centra en un conjunto de ideas, como la de autonomía, creación de sentido, emergencia, corporeización y experiencia. Estos conceptos están encontrando aplicaciones nuevas en un rango de áreas diversas. Un tema candente ha sido el establecimiento de un enfoque enactivo a la interacción social. El propósito principal de este artículo es servir como un punto de entrada avanzado a estos desarrollos recientes. El artículo logra esta tarea de una manera doble: (I) proporciona una síntesis sucinta de las ideas y los argumentos centrales más importantes en el marco teórico del enfoque enactivo y (II) usa esta síntesis para refinar el enfoque enactivo a la interacción social. Se propone una nueva definición operacional de interacción social, la cual no solo enfatiza la agencia cognitiva de los individuos y la irreductibilidad del proceso mismo de interacción, sino también la necesidad de una acción regulada conjuntamente. Se sugiere que esta concepción revisada de 'interacción sociocognitiva' puede brindar el término medio necesario desde el cual entender la confluencia de valores biológicos y culturales en la acción personal.
... Schegloff (1968) and other members of the "first generation" of conversation analysts in the 1970s and 80s (Lerner, 2004) first focused on analyzing ordinary conversation. However, by the early 1990s, Schegloff (1992) and others (especially Goodwin, 1979Goodwin, , 1994Goodwin, , 1995Goodwin, , 2000Goodwin, , 2013Goodwin, , 2017, who was heavily influenced by the anthropologist Hutchins, 1995) began to consider how to educate cognitive psychologists about the post-cognitive insights that CA might usefully contribute to their discipline. Specifically, while cognitive psychologists assume(d) that mind resides in the head of individuals and thus shapes behavior, conversation analysts argue that cognition is distributed among interacting participants and is enacted as collaborative behavior. ...
... Moreover, Edwin Hutchins' seminal work on "cognition in the wild" (i.e., cognition that is not studied under laboratory conditions) posits that mind is "embodied, " "embedded" in social contexts, and "extended" among participants (Hutchins, 1995). He rejects Descartes' position that the mind and body are separate entities and, as I noted previously, argues that while the mind certainly shapes the body, the body also shapes the mind (see also Gallagher, 2005). ...
Research methodology plays a pivotal role in generating new knowledge in any academic discipline. Applied Linguistics (AL) researchers use a variety of research methodologies to address different research problems and research questions, given its interdisciplinary nature. Notwithstanding the plethora of research methodologies used by AL researchers, there are some methodologies that are used less frequently. The aim of this volume is to introduce and discuss these less frequently used methodologies. Each methodology is discussed in two chapters, a theoretical and a practical chapter. In the theoretical chapters, the theoretical foundations, methodological orientation, ethical issues, and critiques and responses are discussed. In the practical chapters, a showcase study is presented and discussed, including why the methodology was used, how it was implemented, the challenges the researchers faced, and the insights they gained. The volume contributes to the current methodological discussion in AL and provides early-career and seasoned researchers with the necessary discussion about these methodological orientations. Future AL researchers may use these methodologies to investigate research questions in their areas of interest. In addition, the volume can complement current methodological resources in postgraduate research methodology courses.
... This question could possibly be addressed using a distributed cognition (DC) framework, as the key operational elements here-external representations and teacher narratives-are outside the mind (thus distributed), and they together help generate internal models. However, the nature of the distribution of cognition here is different from the standard cases examined by classical studies-such as landing an aircraft (Hutchins, 1995b) and navigating a ship (Hutchins, 1995a)-where the analysis focuses on the way mental work during a complex task is "offloaded" to external representations and structures. In contrast to this inside-to-outside "divergent" model of DC, the building of mechanism models in student minds requires an outside-to-inside "convergent" model of DC, where focused internal mental models and networks are generated through a complex intertwining of external structures, such as ERs and teaching narratives. ...
... A second challenge is extending distributed cognition (DC) theory, particularly to develop an account of the way internal mechanism models develop through a convergence of external representations and narratives. Current accounts of DC mostly focus on divergence cases, where ERs move cognitive processes outside the head, and thus help lower cognitive load (Hutchins, 1995a(Hutchins, , b, 2000. The use of ERs to generate and augment imagination, and thus build internal models, is less examined. ...
Science learning requires students to build new mental models of imperceptible mechanisms (photosynthesis, circadian rhythms, atmospheric pressure, etc.). Since mechanisms are structurally complex and dynamic, building such mental models requires mentally simulating novel structures, their state changes, and higher-order transformations (transpiration, oscillation, liquid levels, etc.). These mental simulations also need to be intertwined with a series of external representations (ERs), including formal terms (stomata, guard cells, mass points, damping, etc.), schematic structures (figures, graphs, etc.), and mathematical notations (equations, vectors, etc.). Students’ later encounters with these ERs activate the dynamic mental model of the mechanism. To help learners build such many-layered and dynamic mental models of mechanisms, teachers narrate, and act out, the structures, state changes, transformations, and related ERs. These cohere together to constitute (bring into being) the mechanism models. Based on classroom teaching data, we present a theoretical account of the cognitive mechanisms involved in this complex teaching-to-build process, extending the enactive simulation theory of language and distributed cognition theory. Since teaching narratives seek to approximate scientific mechanisms presented in textbooks, we extend this account to academic language, to understand how textbook descriptions embed mechanisms. We close with some theoretical and pedagogical implications of these two accounts.
... It was also used to understand how learning strategies and challenges experienced by the participants during the intervention were related to their environment. [63][64][65][66] CE was developed to study cognitive processes in organizational contexts. [65][66][67][68][69][70] CE goes beyond the phenomenological approach to healthcare communication b and provides more systematic knowledge about reallife clinical practices, and opening a possibility to register, (a) how the receivers of the interventions perceive and animate Schwalbe et al. ...
... [63][64][65][66] CE was developed to study cognitive processes in organizational contexts. [65][66][67][68][69][70] CE goes beyond the phenomenological approach to healthcare communication b and provides more systematic knowledge about reallife clinical practices, and opening a possibility to register, (a) how the receivers of the interventions perceive and animate Schwalbe et al. ...
OBJECTIVES
The aim of this study was to conduct and evaluate the Blended Learning communication skills training program. The key objective was to investigate (i) how clinical intervention studies can be designed to include cognitive, organizational, and interactive processes, and (ii) how researchers and practitioners could work with integrated methods to support the desired change.
METHODS
The method combined design and implementation of a 12-week Blended Learning communication skills training program based on the Calgary-Cambridge Guide. The training was implemented in a patient clinic at a Danish university hospital and targeted all healthcare professionals at the clinic. Cognitive ethnography was used to document and evaluate healthcare professionals’ implementation and individual competency development, and support the design of in-situ simulation training scenarios.
RESULTS
Thirteen participants completed the program. The synergy within the teams, as well as the opportunities for participants to coordinate, share, discuss, and reflect on the received knowledge with a colleague or on-site researcher, affected learning positively. The knowledge transfer process was affected by negative feedback loops, such as time shortages, issues with concept development and transfer, disjuncture between the expectations of participants and instructors of the overall course structure, as well as participant insecurity and a gradual loss of motivation and compliance.
CONCLUSION
We propose a novel 3-step model for clinical interventions based on our findings and literature review. This model will effectively support the implementation of educational interventions in health care by narrowing the theory-practice gap. It will also stimulate desired change in individual behavior and organizational culture over time. Furthermore, it will work for the benefit of the clinic and may be more suitable for the implementation of communication projects than, for example, randomized setups.
... There are different arguments within the idea of extended cognition. Distributed cognition looks for a kind of extension of humans' cognition outwards into other systems such as social set ups or objects (Hutchins, 1995). Emphasizing the role of materials even more, material engagement theory (MET) (Malafouris, 2013) argues for an extension of the human mind into objects and acknowledges the inherent agencies of these materials and objects. ...
... In seguito, i tre interlocutori iniziano a sviluppare un ciclo 6. A questo riguardo, importanti e seminali ricerche antropologiche sul tema della distribuzione sociale della cognizione e della percezione sono state svolte da Charles Goodwin (2003) relativamente alla visione e da Edwin Hutchins (1995) relativamente all'orientamento. Per quanto concerne le attuali analisi relative alle relazioni uomini-spiriti e alle pratiche divinatorie centrali risultano invece Obeyesekere (1981) in chiave psicanalitica, Mageo, Howard (1996) di ipotesi. ...
L’articolo analizza la relazione tra sensi, pratiche e paesaggi sonori in relazione a Sodo, sede di un pellegrinaggio vodou su scala nazionale ad Haiti. Partendo dagli studi sui soundscapes (Schafer 1977) come punto di vista teorico per analizzare l’interazione tra suono e persone in un luogo specifico, l’articolo mostra l’interazione tra suoni ambientali, musica registrata e performance dal vivo. In particolare, questa ricerca vuole investigare il micro livello dell’ascolto situato, ovvero i modi con i quali gli attori sociali indirizzano la loro attenzione verso i suoni dell’ambiente in relazione alle loro pratiche sociali, culturali e religiose.
... Indeed, although we have emphasised the way in which an analysis of language can provide valuable information about ongoing monitoring and control processes in team-based reasoning, this is not to dismiss the insights into collaborative metareasoning that might also be gained from other forms of behavioural analysis. In this respect, we acknowledge the existence of substantial bodies of behavioural research relating to the complex interplay that arises between individuals engaged in the achievement of common goals, including studies concerning the nature of joint action (e.g., Sebanz and Knoblich 2009), collective intelligence (e.g., Krause et al. 2010), synchrony (e.g., Lakens and Stel 2011;Miles et al. 2011), perspective taking (Gillespie and Richardson 2011) and distributed cognition (e.g., Hutchins 1995). A detailed review of this literature might well pinpoint important findings that could be informative about collaborative metareasoning. ...
Metareasoning refers to processes that monitor and control ongoing thinking and reasoning. The "metareasoning framework" that was established in the literature in 2017 has been useful in explaining how monitoring processes during reasoning are sensitive to an individual's fluctuating feelings of certainty and uncertainty. The framework was developed to capture metareasoning at an individual level. It does not capture metareasoning during collaborative activities. We argue this is significant, given the many domains in which team-based reasoning is critical, including design, innovation, process control, defence and security. Currently, there is no conceptual framework that addresses the nature of collaborative metareasoning in these kinds of domains. We advance a framework of collaborative metareasoning that develops an understanding of how teams respond to the demands and opportunities of the task at hand, as well as to the demands and opportunities afforded by interlocuters who have different perspectives, knowledge, skills and experiences. We point to the importance of a tripartite distinction between "self-monitoring", "other monitoring" and "joint monitoring". We also highlight a parallel distinction between "self-focused control", "other-focused control" and "joint control". In elaborating upon these distinctions, we discuss the prospects for developing a comprehensive collaborative metareasoning framework with a unique focus on language as a measure of both uncertainty and misalignment.
... Isso nos remete aos trabalhos Lave e Wenger (1991) e Hutchins (1995, que rompem com as perspectivas que concebem a aprendizagem como um processo individual, que envolve a aquisição de um corpo formal de conhecimento de um professor ou especialista. De acordo com esses autores, a aprendizagem é um fenômeno que reflete nossa natureza profundamente social. ...
Este artigo apresenta como objetivo descrever e refletir sobre as ações da Web Rádio Ciência com Partilha como espaço de formação docente para estudantes que participam dele e suas potencialidades para divulgação científica. Trata-se de um projeto de extensão desenvolvido por professores e estudantes da UEMG. Ao longo dos anos de 2020, 2021 e 2022, a web rádio atendeu estudantes de graduação da UEMG e fez parceria com várias escolas públicas de educação básica. Para construir os dados apresentados neste trabalho, percorremos as enunciações dos coordenadores gerais do programa em lives e palestras; análises do projeto estruturador desse programa de extensão e das produções científicas geradas no contexto do programa, como TCC. De maneira geral, é possível afirmar que, no processo de construção da web rádio, ela foi ganhando identidade com a perspectiva formativa, educativa e de divulgação da ciência, bem como a defesa da ciência. Palavras-chaves: Web Rádio; Divulgação Científica; Formação Docente.
... This view is also supported by Wenger [27] who views knowledge "as distributed among people and the communities of which they are a part" and that learning is achieved through meaningful participation in the CoP. In addition to acknowledging where knowledge is generated from, Trevelyan [28] argues that engineering knowing requires harnessing knowledge, expertise, and skills that are spread across people within the CoP [29,30]. Supporting this notion, Duke, Harper [31] asserts that learning can be achieved by aggregating and connecting information from the CoP. ...
... Muñoz Martín (2016) argues that the enactive view of cognition, which holds that cognitive processes arise from interaction with the environment and in doing so contribute to shaping this environment, challenges implicit assumptions that the translation process can somehow be studied in disembodied isolation: "translation acts and events can at best be thought of as two sides of one and the same coin" (157). Eschewing the Western, Descartian separation of body and mind and noting their inseparability from human affect (Damasio 1994(Damasio , 1999, and borrowing from Hutchins (1995), Muñoz Martín and Martín de León (2021) underline the dynamic and relational nature of 4E cognition "in the wild" (58) as "the referential framework for our attempts to explain how we translate and interpret" (63). ...
This article investigates the role of affective perception in the development of translation and experiential literacy through the medium of a multimodal translation workshop held with twelve arts practitioners, academics, and translators. Both the rationale for the workshop format and the interpretation of workshop outputs draw on a transdisciplinary framework spanning theories of intermediality and multimodality, the study of acousmatic sound, acoustic atmospheres, and corporeal music/sound reception. Adopting a phenomenographic approach, we discuss the role of the body and the senses in communication and how the sensory exercises developed for our workshop can provide access to the prenoetic nature of perception from both a cognitive and affective standpoint. Recognizing the narrative quality of participants’ comments, a deductive approach was taken to analyze their translations and reflections through the lens of narrative modes of acousmatic music. The article concludes with pedagogical implications on the basis of participants’ reflections. Our findings support the use of a multimodal online translation workshop as both a research method to investigate meaning-making and a pedagogical resource to develop experiential literacy for both practitioners and developing translators.
... This resolute commitment centers on addressing the specific challenges confronting Chinese women, encompassing issues such as domestic violence, workplace bias, and gender disparity. Through the sharing of personal narratives, empirical research, and survey data, these advocates shed light on the stark realities underpinning these challenges, while concurrently rallying for societal attention and transformative change [11]. ...
... Finally, the ontology of these AI systems must account for the dynamic environment of the real world rather than using static internal representations of the world. (For an extended discussion, see, for example, the work of Brooks [1991], Berto and Plebany [2015], Dreyfus [1991], Hutchins [1995], Minsky [1991], Roitblat [2020], Smith [1998Smith [ , 2019, and Krzanowski and Polak [2022]). ...
Philosophy in technology is a research program that studies the philosophical roots of engineering and technology. Philosophy in technology asserts that the resolutions to these problems need to be based on an understanding of their philosophical roots. In åthis paper, we define the objectives of philosophy in technology, the kinds of questions it explores, the methods it uses, and how it differs from the philosophy of technology. We then look at six selected problems to illustrate how the philosophical perspective shines new light onto technology.
... The representational functions of theories can be analyzed by looking at how they are implicated in distributed cognitive mechanisms (Afeltowicz & Wachowski, 2015;Giere & Moffatt, 2003;Hutchins, 1995;Osbeck & Nersessian, 2014;Zhang & Norman, 1994). Moreover, kinds of theories can be established by analyzing their distinct functions, which implies functionalism about theories. ...
In light of the recent credibility crisis in psychology, this paper argues for a greater emphasis on theorizing in scientific research. Although reliable experimental evidence, preregistration, methodological rigor, and new computational frameworks for modeling are important, scientific progress also relies on properly functioning theories. However, the current understanding of the role of theorizing in psychology is lacking, which may lead to future crises. Theories should not be viewed as mere speculations or simple induc-tive generalizations. To address this issue, the author introduces a framework called "cog-nitive metascience," which studies the processes and results of evaluating scientific practice. This study should proceed both qualitatively, as in traditional science and technology studies and cognitive science, and quantitatively, by analyzing scientific discourse using language technology. By analyzing theories as cognitive artifacts that support cognitive tasks, this paper aims to shed more light on their nature. This perspective reveals that multiple distinct theories serve entirely different roles, and studying these roles, along with their epistemic vices and virtues, can provide insight into how theorizing should proceed. The author urges a change in research culture to appreciate the variety of distinct theories and to systematically advance scientific progress. There are several issues that suggest a crisis of confidence in psychology and related fields. They include problems with replicability, generalizability, the cumulative nature of research, and the cohesiveness of our understanding 1 Correspondence address: marcin.milkowski@ifispan.edu.pl.
The concept of cognitive niche is useful to frame morality and violence in a naturalistic perspective. The first sections of this chapter aim at deepening our understanding of this concept, taking advantage of an evolutionary framework that is ideally linked to the considerations I have provided in chapter one, focused on the role of coalition enforcement in illustrating violence as a natural (animal and human) behavior.
This study analyzed collaborative invention projects by teams of lower-secondary (13–14-year-old) Finnish students. In invention projects, student teams design and make materially embodied collaborative inventions using traditional and digital fabrication technologies. This investigation focused on the student teams’ knowledge creation processes by examining how they applied maker practices (i.e., design process, computer engineering, product design, and science practices) in their co-invention projects and the effects of teacher and peer support. In our investigations, we relied on video data and on-site observations, utilizing and further developing visual data analysis methods. Our findings assist in expanding the scope of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) research toward sociomaterially mediated knowledge creation, revealing the open-ended, nonlinear, and self-organized flow of the co-invention projects that take place around digital devices. Our findings demonstrate the practice-based, knowledge-creating nature of these processes, where computer engineering, product design, and science are deeply entangled with design practices. Furthermore, embodied design practices of sketching, practical experimenting, and working with concrete materials were found to be of the essence to inspire and deepen knowledge creation and advancement of epistemic objects. Our findings also reveal how teachers and peer tutor students can support knowledge creation through co-invention.
Pedagogies of engagement in general, and authentic research experiences in particular, have shown benefits for STEM education. However, few studies have focused on STEM graduate students’ research experiences while working and learning in research laboratories. In this chapter, we discuss the preliminary findings of an ongoing cognitive-ethnographic study, in which we observed two engineering laboratories. The focus of our study has been on learning processes and on the formation of graduate students as professional engineers through research experiences in the lab. Originally, our study design included the participant observer embedded in engineering research labs, collecting data through field notes, photography, and informant interviews. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we shifted to online observation of lab meetings and to collection of reflections through autoethnographic journals. The COVID-19 pandemic has also created a unique opportunity to observe how disruptive events affect graduate students’ professional and social lives. While the sudden lockdowns created many adversities for the students, they developed resilience and, with the lab leadership’s help, adopted new strategies to continue their learning and research. Additionally, online lab meetings filled critical needs of students by becoming an intellectual, emotional, and social gathering holding the students together. Our observations also suggest that graduate students in the research lab are self-regulated learners, taking control of their own learning to conceptualize, design, and execute. Self-regulated learning facilitated by various forms of feedback (lab leadership, peers) appears to be the primary learning mechanism in the research lab. We conclude the chapter with implications from our study for educational strategies that enable effective adaptations to learning and research during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. For most users, current LLMs are black boxes, i.e., for the most part, they lack data transparency and algorithmic transparency. They can, however, be phenomenologically and informationally transparent, in which case there is an interactional flow. Anthropomorphising and interactional flow can, in some users, create an attitude of (unwarranted) trust towards the output LLMs generate. We conclude this paper by drawing on the epistemology of trust and testimony to examine the epistemic implications of these dimensions. Whilst LLMs generally generate accurate responses, we observe two epistemic pitfalls. Ideally, users should be able to match the level of trust that they place in LLMs to the degree that LLMs are trustworthy. However, both their data and algorithmic opacity and their phenomenological and informational transparency can make it difficult for users to calibrate their trust correctly. The effects of these limitations are twofold: users may adopt unwarranted attitudes of trust towards the outputs of LLMs (which is particularly problematic when LLMs hallucinate), and the trustworthiness of LLMs may be undermined.
La Interacción Humano-Computadora (HCI por sus siglas en inglés) y las Artes Interactivas (AI) tienen tradiciones, objetivos, enfoques y herramientas diferentes, aunque mantienen desde hace mucho tiempo una relación de diálogo, intercambio de ideas e incluso polinización cruzada. La presente investigación buscó explorar parte de estas influencias mutuas: identificar temas de HCI que puedan enriquecer la práctica artística y reconocer ideas de AI que puedan incorporarse a la agenda de HCI. La metodología empleada consistió en un estudio de caso exploratorio organizado como una experiencia pedagógica de conceptos de HCI para profesionales de AI que involucró a más de 100 artistas que desarrollaron proyectos de interacciones enactivas. Para la recolección de datos se utilizó el método de Observación Participante. Los principales resultados del análisis de los datos mostraron un entrelazamiento de aportes entre ambas disciplinas en al menos tres aspectos: a) la importancia del trabajo en primera persona, b) las relaciones entre el engagement del usuario y el tiempo de uso, y c) la necesidad de contar con definiciones de Experiencia de Usuario con mayor consenso para facilitar las prácticas de evaluación. En conclusión, este trabajo exploratorio proporciona evidencia de la apropiación por parte de las AI del contenido de la HCI y la existencia los tres aspectos mencionados de entrelazamiento entre las agendas de HCI y las AI.
This chapter takes a more collective level of analysis (e.g., group, team, organization) with a focus on leadership development rather than individual leader development. Although the focus is different in terms of level and scope, the development of leaders and the development of collective capacity for leadership are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Whereas leader development is mainly about human capital development, leadership development focuses on social capital as the relevant outcome. Instead of focusing on the intrapersonal development of an individual leader as enhancing the potential for leadership, a collective focus recognizes that leadership is found in the interpersonal connections among individuals engaged in shared work. Rather than a systems input, leadership is conceptualized as an output shaped by systems structure and processes. Much less is known about collective forms of leadership development than those pertaining to individual leader development; however, there has been some notable work in recent years that will be summarized in this chapter. As with leader development, time is an important consideration. Proximal and distal outcomes of leadership development—leading and lagging indicators—are presented and explained.
This is a study of the cooperative work of making steel in a contemporary steel plant. The study is, first of all, a study of the coordinative practices of a cooperative ensemble of operators controlling a time-critical transformation process, while spatially dispersed at different work stations across the plant, working under quite different and varying local constraints and requirements, with only rudimentary means of ongoing communication. Their individual and local contributions to the overall effort must be minutely synchronized to meet the strict temporal requirements of the operation as a whole. These challenges notwithstanding, the operators manage to act concertedly to produce quality steel and to do so routinely. The question is, how do they manage to do that? As the workers in the setting generally are not able to coordinate their cooperative effort discursively, it is analytically both feasible and necessary to foreground and identify the knowledge of metallurgy of steel and of the plant that enables them, as they go about their own local activities, to apprehend the problems and intentions of their colleagues as reflected in the changing state of the technical processes. The underlying thesis of the study is that in order to answer the general question of how workers engaged in cooperative work are able to heed the activities of their colleagues, and to do so routinely, we are well advised to ‘take the concept of practice seriously’.
Hayek has influenced (neoliberal) economic discourses over decades. This chapter shows that Hayek the economist, who promotes a disembodied approach to the market order because of its abstraction, contradicts Hayek the psychologist, who developed a radically embodied view of the brain whereby abstraction as a cognitive process must be embodied. Consequently, the market as a medium of abstraction must be grounded in, and bounded by, embodiment. The argument put forth is that Hayek’s disembodied view of the market is motivated by his ideological rejection of social justice. The Hayek paradox is compared with the psychologist and economist Herbert Simon who consistently employs a disembodied approach to cognition throughout his work. Despite the strengths of some of their developments, this book follows in the footsteps of Hayek the psychologist to develop a more systematic approach to embodied economics in which, contra Hayek the economist, social justice ultimately becomes the beacon for policy and economic practice.
The concept of actor is a radical alternative to the rational economic agent, based on two embodied notions: Autonomy, which refers to capabilities of self-determination and flourishing; and feelings, which ground valuation as enabling reasonable action. In this chapter the person is viewed as developmentally and historically unfolding, embedded in social relations, in the Hegelian tradition. Agency is analyzed in terms of the conceptual triad of recognition, inward and outward embodiment, and is distributed in assemblages of actors and artifacts. These assemblages underpin the potential “We-mode” of action as well as agential powers experienced as feelings, such as trust in the context of markets. Agency is further elaborated with Sen’s notions of capabilities and functionings, and complemented by identity expressed through narratives and memories shared with others. In sum, the reasonable person in the economy is the actor (as different from agent), who experiences feelings, seeks to flourish in autonomy, and whose reasons for action are mutually recognized by others.
Many digital platforms pit consumers or customers and service workers against one another or render human work invisible, concealing human labor for profit and the charismatic allure of automation. When schooling is digitized, what transformations occur to the relationships between teachers, parents, and students, and with what consequences? In pre-pandemic virtual and hybrid schooling, I find that teachers developed alternative strategies to practice caring responsiveness in online environments of low visibility through a process I call "distributed attunement.'' These strategies entailed building holistic relationships, collaborating with student families and fellow teachers, and interpreting student experiences using a combination of platform data and social information. Rather than giving in to digitization as a vehicle for removing or obscuring care work, this study illustrates that teachers centered relationships as core to the virtual schooling experience. The distributed attunement teachers in virtual schools created indicates the impossibility of separating technical and affective labor in a pedagogical context and provide promising sites to develop supports for high-quality online education. Further, teachers' navigation of limited visibility suggests tactics for CSCW researchers concerned with documenting invisible labor in the development of digital systems. Nevertheless, these strategies can be appropriated or undermined by employers in ways that threaten to diminish their efficacy, requiring ongoing advocacy to push for flourishing online schooling options.
Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay “Les mathématiques de l'homme,” originally published in 1956, is the least known of all his publications. It is also arguably his most prescient, capturing the enduring possibilities and latent pitfalls in anthropology's relationship with mathematics that have continued to beset the discipline to the present day. The aim of presenting a new translation of this essay is to prompt reflections on the changing landscape of research on and teaching of anthropology, which is still as tangled up with the philosophy and practice of mathematics as it was then.
The digital design research community keeps moving towards increasingly techno-centric spaces. Largely development-focused, the evolution of technology adoption in our sector is often reported from performance and efficiency perspectives, instead of its efficacy – its implementation and adoption in real-world design practices and cultures. In that context, this paper presents a theory framework to investigate the adoption of digital fabrication technology among craft practitioners - emphasising the challenges among craftsperson’s activities protected by both heritage and cultural traditions developed outside authored and institutionalised contexts of digital design research. Through the coupling of theoretical strands originated in management studies (socio-materiality), media obsolescence, heritage, and crafts theory, our approach is demonstrated through the infusion of digital fabrication tools into the analogue world of letterpress printmaking. Through methods such as community engagement, codesign and prototyping, and graphic outputs, we reflect on issues emanating from uniting a technology that has already faced industrial obsolescence with newly developed digital tools, including the influence of heritage and cultural traditions, tensions around irreplaceability, the need for preservation, spatial and community manifestations, and knowledge transfer and translation across seemingly diverging ways of engaging with technology. The resulting approach challenges the standard hegemonic analogue/digital dichotomy and allows for the interrogation of a more ‘complexified’, nuanced field of hybrid practices encouraging a balance between preservation, tradition, and experimentation.
Based on the sociocultural theory of learning and distributed cognition, using learning aids should benefit students’ performance, as learning aids can compensate for a lack of knowledge or skills and reduce strain on short-term memory. The present study investigated the use of a diverse set of learning aids in Grade 8 of vocational education in Flanders (the northern part of Belgium) and whether access to learning aids affects students’ mathematics performance. Data from the 2019 national assessment on mathematics were used. The teacher questionnaire showed that learning aids were available in most classes for all students. Overall, the calculator is the most frequently used learning aid, together with the multiplication table and conversion table. A field experiment was conducted, with a condition where students were allowed to use learning aids and a condition where students were not allowed to use learning aids. A multilevel model was used to test for differences. The results revealed that access to learning aids does not significantly increase students’ performance, and, thus, access to learning aids does not generate an unfair advantage.
According to virtue epistemology, the main aim of education is the development of the cognitive character of students (Pritchard, 2014, 2016). Given the proliferation of technological tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs for solving cognitive tasks, how should educational practices incorporate the use of such tools without undermining the cognitive character of students? Pritchard (2014, 2016) argues that it is possible to properly solve this ‘technology-education tension’ (TET) by combining the virtue epistemology framework with the theory of extended cognition (EXT) (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). He argues that EXT enables us to consider tools as constitutive parts of the students’ cognitive system, thus preserving their cognitive character from technologically induced cognitive diminishment. The first aim of this paper is to show that this solution is not sufficient to solve the TET. Second, I aim to offer a complementary and more encompassing framework of tool-use to address the TET. Then, I apply it to the educational uses of ChatGPT as the most notable example of LLM, although my arguments can be extended to other generative AI systems. To do so, in Sect. 1.1, I present Pritchard’s framework of cognitive character and virtue epistemology applied in education, to which I am committed in this treatment. In Sects. 2 and 3, I respectively illustrate Pritchard’s (2014) solution to the TET, and I highlight the general limitations of his proposal. Thus, in Sect. 4.1 I characterize ChatGPT as a computational cognitive artifact using Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts. In Sect. 4.2, I introduce my proposal, which combines Pritchard’s account of virtue epistemology with Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts to address the TET. Finally, in Sect. 5.1, I present some epistemically virtuous uses of ChatGPT in educational contexts. To conclude, I argue in favor of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing educational activities involving AI technologies such as ChatGPT.
The present work explores the link between navigational processes and the experience of place by considering the case of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters. Our analysis shows how the idiosyncratic wayfinding methods of the Evenki result in a unique experience of place – a case that elucidates the important question of the impact of navigational processes on environmental experience, and that advances the debate between mental map theory and practical mastery theory in anthropology. We defend that their wayfinding methods – involving a particular gait, path networks, and vast hydrological and toponymical knowledge – allow the Evenki to navigate without a need for integrating egocentric and allocentric frames of reference. As a result, the Evenki experience themselves as free individuals moving through an environment that is alive and rife with possibility. This analysis reveals the ways in which wayfinding processes relying predominantly on route knowledge – as opposed to survey knowledge – affect environmental experience. Alternative methods of wayfinding can be seen as a form of resistance to the uniformisation of landscapes, and as a way of embracing the heterogeneity of space.
According to Edwin Hutchins (in Cogn Sci 19:265–288, 1995a; Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, 1995b), cognitive science should explain how humans became skilled processors of symbolic structures, rather than assuming that the architecture of cognition is symbolic. He suggests that the origin of symbolic processing should be traced back to human interaction in sociocultural systems. Developing Hutchins’ ideas, the distributed approach to language grounds linguistic abilities in proto-symbolic exchanges that can be observed in early child–parent interactions (Spurrett and Cowley in The Extended Mind. The MIT Press, 2010). Here, the parent’s adoption of a language stance (i.e., the assumption that children’s gestures and utterances have a symbolic content) leads to the reinforcement of the child's linguistic behavior, which in turn leads the child to adopt a linguistic stance toward other people, and so on. In this view, the parent–child pair forms a dual system from which the language stance emerges. In order to envisage an explanation to human’s symbolic processing abilities in a distributed perspective, we propose to add a further step to this hypothesis. Once language is adopted as the privileged vehicle for interaction, a symbolic stance, in which symbols are understood as if they were well-codified objects of a specific language, emerges on a multiple system composed of (at least) a cognitive subject, the social community of users of certain symbolic systems, and the conventions and norms associated with the use of these symbolic systems.
In pursuing a systemic view on cognition (as introduced by Cowley and Vallée-Tourangeau in Cognition beyond the brain. Springer, pp. 255–273, 2013), we recognize that cognition unfolds not just brain-side as postulated by traditional cognitive science (see e.g., Searle, The rediscovery of mind. MIT Press, 1992) but also world-side (cf. p. 255). This paper presents an attempt at specifying the systemic nature of human cognition by exploring it as occurring in the functional intersection of different ontologies (cf. Gahrn-Andersen in Organizational cognition: The theory of social organizing. Routledge, 2023). Part of the motivation for doing so is to inform views that overplay the uniqueness of experience (e.g., Jesus, Phenomenol Cogn Sci 17:861–887, 2018) and, thus, tone down the fact that cognition is imbued with and, hence, constrained by non-unique (or general) factors such as concepts, habits, instincts, affordances, activity trails etc. which ensure systemic coherence in the first place. More specifically, we pave new grounds for a systemic take on cognition by tracing human cognitive activity to what proponents of performativist Science and Technology Studies term ‘practical ontologies’ (Jensen, Berliner Blätter 84:93–104, 2021). Such ontologies have proven to be fruitful for disentangling messy human—non-human relations which are structurally co-determined by practices and their material arrangements. At the same time, however, little has been said about how such ontologies link up with aspects of the cognitive.
Designing interactive technology to support safety-critical systems poses multiple challenges with respect to security, access to operators and the proprietary nature of the data. We conducted a two-year participatory design project with French power grid operators to both understand their specific needs and to collaborate on the design of a novel collaborative tool called StoryLines . Our primary objective was to capture detailed, in-context data about operators’ work practices as part of a larger project designed to provide bi-directional assistance between an intelligent agent and human operator. We targeted handovers between shifts to take advantage of the operators’ existing practice of articulating the current status of the grid and expected future events. We use information that would otherwise be lost to gather valuable information about the operator’s decision rationale and decision-making patterns. This paper describes how we combined a bottom-up participatory design approach with a top-down generative theory approach to design StoryLines, an interactive timeline that helps operators collect information from diverse tools, record reminders and share relevant information with the next shift’s operator. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges of working with users in safety-critical environments and directions for future research.
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