Distributed Cognition

Attachment

DistributedCognition.pdf

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Description

Like all other branches of cognitive science, distributed cognition seeks to understand the organization of cognitive systems. Like most of cognitive science, it takes cognitive processes to be those that are involved in memory, decision making, inference, reasoning, learning, and so on. Also following mainstream cognitive science, it characterizes cognitive processes in terms of the propagation and transformation of representations. What distinguishes distributed cognition from other approaches is the commitment to two related theoretical principles.

The first concerns the boundaries of the unit of analysis for cognition. The second concerns the range of mechanisms that may be assumed to participate in cognitive processes. While mainstream cognitive science looks for cognitive events in the manipulation of symbols (Newell, et.al, 1989), or more recently, patterns of activation across arrays of processing units (Rumelhart, et.al, 1986; McClelland, et.al., 1986) inside individual actors, distributed cognition looks for a broader class of cognitive events and does not expect all such events to be encompassed by the skin or skull of an individual.

When one applies these principles to the observation of human activity “in the wild”, at least three interesting kinds of distribution of cognitive process become apparent: 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, and processes may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of later events. The effects of these kinds of distribution of process are extremely important to an understanding of human cognition.

The roots of distributed cognition are deep, but the field came into being under its current name in the mid-1980s. In 1978, Vygotsky’s Mind in Society was published in English. Minsky published his Society of Mind in 1985. At the same time, Parallel Distributed Processing was making a comeback as a model of cognition (Rumelhart, et al, 1986). The nearly perfect mirror symmetry of the titles of Vygotsky’s and Minsky’s books suggests that something special might be happening in systems of distributed processing, whether the processors are neurons, connectionist nodes, areas of a brain, whole persons, groups of persons, or groups of groups of persons.

Author

Edwin Hutchins. University of California, San Diego