Distributed, External and Extended Cognition
This chapter is concerned with how we think with things. This is not merely a matter of mediation but how all manner of tools, technologies and representations form a larger cognitive system. Distributed cognition recognised that to pilot a ship into port
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Distributed, External and Extended Cognition
Anyone who has closely observed the practices of cognition is struck with the fact that the “mind” never works alone. The intelligences revealed through these practices are distributed across minds, persons, and the symbolic and physical environments, both natural and artificial. (Pea 1993, p. 47)
5.1
Introduction
One reason why classical cognition may have failed to maintain traction within HCI is its mismatch with the very thing it is trying to explain. Classical cognition take place exclusively inside the head of an individual, while HCI is about using and interacting with technology. Any account of the psychology of interaction must recognise that the effective use of technology is a result of these two quite different domains working together. This being said, there have been a number of proposals regarding the role of the external in cognition. In Chap. 2 we discussed the pivotal role artefacts play in mediating cognition and in this chapter we consider three other proposals which significantly extend this position. The first of these is distributed cognition. The argument in favour of cognition being distributed can be traced back to the work of one of the founding fathers of psychology, Wilhelm Wundt working in the 1870s. Wundt is probably best known for his pioneering work in the laboratory-based study of such things as our ability to judge and distinguish between levels of brightness or loudness. However, this comprised only one half of his work, the other being devoted to Volkerpsychologie or “folk psychology”. Folk psychology is concerned with what he described as the “higher psychological functions”. In essence he was an advocate of a two component approach in which he distinguished the low level laboratory from the more qualitative approaches he adopted to understand the higher level functions. Cole and Engeström (1993), in reviewing Wundt’s work, note that he proposed the use of ethnography, folklore and linguistics to study folk psychology and the use of these © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 P. Turner, HCI Redux, Human–Computer Interaction Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42235-0_5
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5 Distributed, External and Extended Cognition
techniques was to provide a description rather than an explanation of what was at work. They summarise his position by stating that, “while elementary psychological functions may be considered to occur ‘in the head’, higher psychological functions required additional cognitive resources that are to be found in the sociocultural milieu” (ibid, p. 3). In short, the higher psychological functions required resources lying outside an individual’s own cognition. A more contemporary and familiar treatment of distributed cognition lies with the work of Hutchins (Hutchins 1995a, b) who is usually credited with the concept itself. His primary claim is that cognitive processes are distributed among multiple human actors, external artefacts and representations and the relationships between these elements which
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