02/11/2020 Dr. Taylor J. Scott tjscott@ucsd.edu

COGS 1 GUEST LECTURE:

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION & COGNITIVE ETHNOGRAPHY

Distributed Cognition in (outside of) a Nutshell

POLLING QUESTION:

HOW MANY OF YOU THINK (OR THOUGHT BEFORE READING THE PAPER) THAT COGNITION IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS INSIDE OF OUR BRAINS?

What came before cognitive science?

Behaviorism

What came before cognitive science?

Behaviorism

What came before cognitive science?

Behaviorism

• Classical conditioning—think

Pavlov’s dog • Focused on stimulus-response • John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner

were major players in developing behaviorism and radical/neo-

behaviorism (acknowledged

internal processes) • There are many flavors of

behaviorism…

What came before cognitive science?

Behaviorism

• Classical conditioning—think

Pavlov’s dog • Focused on stimulus-response • John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner

were major players in developing behaviorism and radical/neo-

behaviorism (acknowledged

internal processes) • There are many flavors of

behaviorism…

What came before cognitive science?

Behaviorism

• Classical conditioning—think

Pavlov’s dog • Focused on stimulus-response • John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner

were major players in developing behaviorism and radical/neo-

behaviorism (acknowledged

internal processes) • There are many flavors of

behaviorism…Skinner Watson

SO DOES THAT SETTLE THAT?

POLLING QUESTION: How comfortable are you with behaviorism as the primary explanation for high-level human cognition?

A. Very B. Somewhat C. Not very D. Not at all

SO DOES THAT SETTLE THAT?

THE COGNITIVE

REVOLUTION!

Around the 1950s, a new kid on the block…

Cognitivism

Around the 1950s, a new kid on the block…

Cognitivism

Around the 1950s, a new kid on the block…

Cognitivism

• An “all-out effort” to establish

meaning-making as the central process of psychology

• Rejected “thinking” as a

behavior, but rather its own

object of study and theory • Uses computational models as

the primary metaphor for

describing cognition

Around the 1950s, a new kid on the block…

Cognitivism

• An “all-out effort” to establish

meaning-making as the central process of psychology

• Rejected “thinking” as a

behavior, but rather its own

object of study and theory • Uses computational models as

the primary metaphor for describing cognition

Cognitivism: Some Major Players

George Miller Noam Chomsky Allen Newell

George Miller (Princeton University's Department of Psychology): a psychologist focused on exploring “working memory” in humans, perhaps most well known for his 1956 article “The magical number, Plus or minus two” — one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It is often interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller's law

Noam Chomsky (Harvard and MIT): A linguist, philosopher and social critic (among other things). Referred to as “the father of modern linguistics” and is known for his work on universal grammar (maintained that syntactic knowledge is at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages). Well known for his rejection of Skinner’s behaviorist approach to language in a 1959 paper.

Allen Newell (Carnegie Mellon): was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His work came to the attention of economist (and future nobel laureate) Herbert A. Simon, and, together with programmer J. C. Shaw, they developed the first true artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist. Newell's work on the program laid the foundations of the field, and he was well known for simulating intelligence with machines.

SO DOES THAT SETTLE THAT?

POLLING How comfortable are you with with equating what the human brain does, and the central seat of cognition, with a computer?

A. Very B. Somewhat C. Not very D. Not at all

POSTCOGNITIVISM

Another newer new kid on the block…

Postcognitivism• Rejects the notion that cognition

is something that “just happens

inside the brain” • Posits that human cognition

cannot be accurately or wholly

described without taking context, environment, embodiment, culture, and artifacts into consideration.

• Might be the “ok boomer”

equivalent of rejecting some of the previous paradigms

Did you know…

• The founding meeting of

the Cognitive Science

Society was held at UCSD in 1979

• In 1986, the first

Cognitive Science

Department in the world

was founded at UCSD • This is a particularly

special place to be

studying Cog Sci!

Postcognitivism: Some Major Players

Don Norman Edwin Hutchins Jim Hollan

Don Norman : is the director of The Design Lab. He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science. Norman applied his training as an engineer and computer scientist, and as an experimental and mathematical psychologist, to the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Norman eventually became founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Science - and was also one of the organizers of that first meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. HIS FLAVOR OF DESIGN FOCUSES ON CONTEXT AND CULTURE!

Ed Hutchins: is a professor emeritus and former department head of cognitive science at the UCSD. Hutchins is one of the main developers and proponents of distributed cognition. Hutchins was a student of the cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade (who was also at UCSD) and has been a strong advocate of the use of anthropological methods in cognitive science. He is considered the father of modern “cognitive ethnography”. He looks cool in his aviators because he is a pilot and actually spent/spends a lot of time studying airline cockpits.

Jim Hollan: is professor of cognitive science and adjunct professor of computer science here at UCSD. He and Hutchins were co-directors of the Distributed Cognition and Human–Computer Interaction Labfor a long time, and he co-directs the Design Lab. Hollan has also spent time working at Xerox PARC and at Bell Labs. Along with Hutchins and Norman, he led the Intelligent Systems Group in the Institute for Cognitive Science at UCSD. Has spent most of his career doing HCI-related research with a focus on wanting to understand the cognitive and computational characteristics of dynamic interactive representations as the basis for effective system design.

• Behaviorism • Cognitivism • Post-cognitivism

Some varying views on cognition…

• Behaviorism • Cognitivism • Postcognitivism

Some varying views on cognition…

Distributed Cognition “In The Wild”

• Cognition in the Wild—Hutchin’s seminal work

• Conducted an ethnographic inquiry on a naval vessel

• Came out with a ton of data • Analyzed said data and

further developed DCOG • Demonstrates effectiveness

of Cognitive Ethnography

Insights about cognition 1

• You need a human brain to do human cognition

• Humans have bodies, language, artifacts, and live in complex built environments (not a vacuum)

• Mind and body interact in surprising and interesting ways

Insights about cognition 2

• A person interacting with an environment for thinking can do things that a person in isolation cannot

• Humans working together can do things that no person can do alone

• Humans are highly social and our cognition depends on the fact that we have language, and especially culture too

Where is the mind 1

• Is the mind in the brain?

• Is the computer a good model for the mind?

• A brain in a vat is a poor model for the human mind. Cognition is embodied!

Where is the mind 2

• The brain is a controller for body-world interaction

• Human life is lived in complex social environments that are filled with cultural artifacts

• Our cognition and our mindfulness emerge from the interactions of our brains and bodies with this socio-cultural world. It’s distributed!

DCOG fundamental premise: Cognition, in all its forms, emerges from the interactions among the elements of complex systems.

Cognitive Systems (units of analysis):

• a neural circuit composed of interacting neurons

• an area of the brain (e.g. V1 in visual cortex) composed of interacting neural circuits

• a whole brain composed of interacting areas

• a whole brain and a whole body in interaction

• brain-body-world in interaction

• a group of people in interaction with one another and with a shared setting

A hypothesis about cognition: High-level human cognition depends on interactions with culturally organized material and social structures Cognition is affected by or shaped by interactions with the material and social world: Action can reveal underlying cognitive processes Some forms of human cognition are constituted in interactions of brain and body with the material and social world: Action is a form of cognition

DEFINITION:Distributed Cognition: a theoretical framework for how cognition is distributed across material, social, and cultural systems, and that moves beyond the individual as the primary unit of analysis

Feature Big Idea…

Division of Cognitive Labor

How a cognitive task is/can be distributed between agents—breaking up a cognitive accomplishment into component parts

Coordination of Parts

Concerned with the “how” of organizational relationships and interactions between agents that are required to perform a cognitive task

Propagation of Representations

Accounts for how different forms of representations are off-loaded into the environment and made available to other agents

Temporal Distribution

Emphasizes both the human-scale temporal relationships and constraints inherent in human activity—but also smaller and larger time scales (e.g. physiological structure, material structure)

Framework of Distributed Cognition

DEFINITION:Distributed Cognition: a theoretical framework for how cognition is distributed across material, social, and cultural systems, and that moves beyond the individual as the primary unit of analysis

So how might we study this?…

Observing Earth through the…Cognito-scope!

Cognito-scope™ Edwin Hutchins

The Earth seen through the Cognito-scope

North America seen through the Cognito-scope

COGNITIVE ETHNOGRAPHY

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. - Oscar Wilde

What is Ethnography?

A suite of methods: • The systematic study of the lifeworld of a

community • How the members of a community live,

interact, communicate • The material and ideational aspects of life

A product • Documentation of a lifeworld • An artifact that details your observations,

inferences, and analyses

What is Cognitive Ethnography?

1. Accurate records of specific instances of real world human behavior

2. Analysis of the cognitive aspects of those instances 3. Use wider ethnography as a source of knowledge

about what is being done, what resources are available for doing it, what conventions are used

Our BIG Problem

• Our minds are adapted to systematically NOT see many aspects of the organization of activity

• This happens at all levels of organization • You think you are seeing the world you live

in, but most of the interesting detail – most of the details that must be understood in order to understand cognition in this world - goes unnoticed

Manifestations of the BIG Problem

• We consider our own daily lives to be routine and uninteresting so we do not attend to the details

• We fill in gaps in visual scenes, thereby failing to see the gaps. We rely on the world to provide consistency

• We ignore the background in scenes in order to better see the figure

More Manifestations of the BIG Problem

• We do not hear disfluencies in speech unless they are overwhelming

• If we are lucky, we remember the gist of what people say to us. We rarely remember the words they used to say it When we are not so lucky, we remember what we expected or wanted someone to say, and not what they said at all

Still More Manifestations…

• We understand the world through cultural models that make some things obvious and make other things impossible to think. We almost never see the cultural models that structure our understandings

• We effortlessly process multiple sources of information, yet we rarely attend to the relations among these sources

WHAT CAN WE DO?

We need tools and techniques to overcome the many manifestations of the

seeing-but-not-seeing problem…

WE NEED THE COGNITO-SCOPE!

Tuning the Cognitio-scope

• You must slow down. • Do not be in a hurry to understand • Set aside time to look and reflect • You cannot multitask the seeing of details in the

world. Seeing in detail will take all of your attention • You must be honest.

• You will experience a temptation to fill in gaps in your observations. Resist it!

• You must describe things as they are • Not as you expect them to be. Not as you think they

normally occur. Not as you would like them to be

think small

When you have learned how to see your world, you will find that the smallest moment of human activity is loaded with interesting cognitive phenomena!

To overcome the tendency to take the world for granted…

• Pay attention to details • Be methodical • Plan your observations • Keep a clear distinction between data and analysis

• Your data is what you actually recorded • Everything else is analysis or interpretation

Cognitive Ethnography Methods

• Observations and field notes • Freezing action with photographs • Overcoming the fleeting nature of speech by

recording and transcribing interviews • Capturing the rich multimodal nature of

interaction through the use of video recording • The application of theoretical and conceptual

knowledge to analyze your ethnographic data

This toolkit is well-suited to studying distributed cognition “in the wild”

• It helps you notice social interactions • …interactions with the material world • …interactions with artifacts • how things unfold over time • how cognitive tasks are the product of

emergent behaviors due to interaction • etc.

All of these techniques are part of the Cognitive Ethnography Toolkit

• You will find many of them useful in your own research/class projects

• They provide excellent structure for doing qualitative research

• Most importantly, they are specifically geared towards…generating insight about the cognition all around us!

NOTHING NEVER

HAPPENS

QUESTIONS?

“It depends…” - Professor Taylor Scott

MY OFFICE HOURS ARE:

Thursdays, 11a-1p, CSB 247 You are welcome to stop by and chat!

My email: tjscott@ucsd.edu

If I don’t respond, send it again!

Interested in DCOG/High-level Human Cognition? Courses in bold are courses I teach

• Courses you can take in COGS department: • COGS 10: Cognitive Consequences of Technology • COGS 12: Language, Culture, and Cognition • COGS 102A: Cognitive Perspectives • COGS 100: Cyborgs Now and In The Future

You can also seek out courses in these departments: • Psychology • Linguistics • Sociology • Communications

Interested in Cognitive Ethnography/Field Methods? Courses in bold are courses I teach

• Courses you can take in COGS department: • COGS 13: Studying Cognition in the Wild • COGS 15: An Uncensored Introduction to Language  • COGS 102B: Cognitive Ethnography • COGS 143: Animal Cognition

These qualitative field methods are also highly applicable to the study of the following fields: • Human-Computer Interaction • Design and Interaction • Prototyping • Information Visualization