Distributed Cognition of a Navigational Instrument Display Task

Abstract

Distributed representation is a representational system that is composed of an integration and exchange of external and internal representational information in a seamless and interweaving manner. The performance of any everyday task utilizes perceptual information obtained from the external environment and internal information retrieved from one’s memory. External representations constructed from information extracted from external objects (such as written symbols) and internal representations (such as schemas) dynamically integrate and interweave to result in a rich pattern of cognitive behavior. The principle of distributed representations is that a distributed cognitive task involves a system of distributed representations that consists of internal and external representations (Zhang & Norman, 1994, 1995). The task is neither exclusively dependent on internally nor exclusively dependent on externally processed information, but rather on the interaction of the two information spaces formed by the internal and external representations.