From Cognitive Amplifiers to Cognitive Prostheses: Understandings of the Material Basis of Cognition in Visual Analytics

Abstract

The most salient ways in which data visualization and interactive techniques have been understood as the material basis of cognition in the emergent field of visual analytics are discussed. Three main dominant understandings have captured the imagination and theorizations of researchers and technicians in this field: data visualizations and interactive techniques as cognitive amplifiers, cognitive prostheses, and cognitive mediators. The analysis of this treatment of materiality in cognition provides an up-to-date report on whether remarks on the situated character of cognition and the active role of human agents have, in effect, been incorporated in this field or not. We argue that even though visual analytic researchers have incorporated some of the ideas of situated cognition and tempered traditional arguments of information processing from cognitive science, understandings of the role of materiality in cognition are still marked by universalisms and ascriptions of exacerbated agency to visual representations.