Distributed Cognition Perspective Research Articles

Distributed Cognition in Fractured Ecologies

In this article we present a conversation analytic case study of a video-mediated teleconsultation in which the participants face a problem with the audio connection. During the problem-solving process the interactants need to direct one another’s attention and action in relation to technological artefacts to solve the problem. Video mediation limits physical access to distant participants’ physical ecology, which is overcome by fitting interactional practices to the communicative medium available at a given moment. Drawing on insights from the distributed cognition perspective and the CA perspective on participation, multimodality, and epistemics, we propose specifications to existing theories of problems solving, seeking to develop integrative approaches to real-world problem solving.

Analysis of low-carbon rice farming behavior and its influencing factors in farmers under the distributed cognition perspective—empirical study based on 2,173 farmers in Jiangxi Province

IntroductionRice production is the core component of the food security strategy in China, but it is also a major source of methane and nitrous oxide. Promoting low-carbon rice farming (LCRF) to increase the carbon sink, decrease carbon emissions, and achieve low-carbon, high-yield production is an inevitable “win-win” choice for achieving “double carbon” targets and guaranteeing national food security. This study contributes to the advancement of research on farmers’ adoption decisions and fills gaps in LCRF’s technical research on farmers’ decision-making behavior. The results also provide a basis for formulating policies to encourage LCRF and protect cultivated land.MethodsThis study conducted field research on 2,173 farming households in Jiangxi Province, a traditional agricultural province in China, and examined the effects of personal forces, local forces, and cultural forces on LCRF adoption behavior by introducing the distributed cognition theoretical framework based on a status quo analysis and employing the multivariate ordinal logistic model.Results and discussionThe results of the study showed that: 1) the overall acceptance of LCRF behavior is currently not very high. In the 2173 questionnaires, the mean number of LCRF behavior items accepted by farmers was 3.10 items; 153 farmers did not adopt any LCRF behavior, and only 77 farmers adopted all LCRF behaviors. Most farmers (n = 535) adopted three LCRF behaviors. 2) In distributed cognition affecting LCRF behavior, acceptance was primarily affected by cultural forces, followed by local forces, while the effects of personal forces were limited. Therefore, it is recommended that training and promotion should be increased, policy subsidies should be increased, the land market should be improved, and LCRF demonstrations should be carried out to increase the acceptance of LCRF behavior among rice farmers.

Social and digital media monitoring for nonviolence: a distributed cognition perspective of the precariousness of peace work

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations.Design/methodology/approachUsing a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring.FindingsThe authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring.

Cued recall: Using photo-elicitation to examine the distributed processes of remembering with photographs

In studies of cued recall, responses to photographic stimuli have often been examined in isolation of related photography practices (e.g. taking, organising, or sharing images), and without considering how photographs are used. In contrast, photo-elicitation methods position photographs not simply as cues, but as meaningful artefacts around which accounts of the past are constructed. Drawing on photo-elicitation interviews, I examine cued recall from a distributed cognition perspective, proposing that it consists of varying combinations of several, potentially-distributed processes. First, looking at photographs can catalyse remembering by surfacing relevant ideas, followed by: stimulation (of feelings and emotions), simulation and narrative production, association, inference, and meaning-making. Using examples from my interviews, I consider how each process is socially and materially configured. I then discuss the role of diverse photographic practices in the convergence of these processes, and the implications for conceptions of cueing, recall, and autobiographical memory.

Data Work and Decision Making in Emergency Medical Services: A Distributed Cognition Perspective

Emergency medical services (EMS) teams are first responders providing urgent medical care to severely ill or injured patients in the field. Despite their criticality, EMS work is one of the very few medical domains with limited technical support. This paper describes a study conducted to examine technology opportunities for supporting EMS data work and decision-making. We transcribed and analyzed 25 simulation videos. Using the distributed cognition framework, we examined EMS teams' work practices that support information acquisition and sharing. Our results showed that EMS teams leveraged various mechanisms (e.g., verbal communication and external cognitive aids) to distribute cognitive labor in managing, collecting, and using patient data. However, we observed a set of prominent challenges in EMS data work, including lack of detailed documentation in real time, situation recall issues, situation awareness problems, and challenges in decision making and communication. Based on the results, we discuss implications for technology opportunities to support rapid information acquisition, integration, and sharing in time-critical, high-risk medical settings.

Symbiotic cognition as an alternative for socially extended cognition

ABSTRACTAccording to a promising proposal, cognitive abilities and processes in the context of social institutions should be characterized as socially extended cognition. However, this idea invokes resistance because it seems to invoke metaphysical problems such as a serious variant of the problem of cognitive bloat. In this paper, I argue that defenders of socially extended cognition are not overly worried by such problems because their position is akin to a position known as ‘distributed cognition,’ which avoids these problems. Nevertheless, I will argue that the explanatory aims of socially extended cognition do not correspond to the distributed cognition perspective. The ensuing predicament can be avoided, however, by recognizing that the idea of socially extended cognition hinges on the conflation of two dimensions of the interconnection of the elements in a cognitive system, which I will label ‘functional integration’ and ‘task-dependency.’ Separating these dimensions allows us to identify an overlooked alternative for extended and distributed cognition – symbiotic cognition – that fits cognition in social institutions better than both and avoids the predicament.

The coordination between train traffic controllers and train drivers: a distributed cognition perspective on railway

Although there has long been a call for a holistic systems perspective to better understand real work in the complex domain of railway traffic, prior research has not strongly emphasised the socio-technical perspective. In operational railway traffic, the successful planning and execution of the traffic are the product of the socio-technical system comprised by both train drivers and traffic controllers. This paper presents a study inspired by cognitive ethnography with the aim to characterise the coordinating activities that are conducted by train traffic controllers and train drivers in the work practices of the socio-technical system of Swedish railway. The theoretical framework of distributed cognition (DCog) is used as a conceptual and analytical tool to make sense of the complex railway domain and the best practices as they are developed and performed “in the wild”. The analysis reveals a pattern of collaboration and coordination of actions among the workers and we introduce the concept of enacted actionable practices as a key concern for understanding how a successfully executed railway traffic emerges as a property of the socio-technical system. The implications for future railway research are briefly discussed.

Individuals and their interactions in demand planning processes: an agent-based, computational testbed

The demand planning process in semiconductor supply chains faces many challenges. In this process, individuals, their properties such as sensing capabilities and their interactions play a crucial role. This paper shows how agent-based modelling (ABM) can provide a computational testbed to investigate these aspects with respect to forecast accuracy. Based on the requirements of the demand planning context, we develop an empirically validated agent-based model of the demand planning process. In this model, we incorporate different concepts from behavioural science and the distributed cognition perspective. We show the usefulness of this agent-based computational testbed by using a case study from the semiconductor industry. Our model shows that demand planning accuracy does not depend on the planning capabilities of planners alone, but that the interactions of the individuals, emerging from the planning process design, may both positively and negatively affect accuracy.

Manufacturing in the wild – viewing human-based assembly through the lens of distributed cognition

The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science has been and is becoming increasingly central within human factors and ergonomics (HF&E) and, since at the same time, there has long been a call for a more systems perspective in the area with a somewhat wider unit of analysis. This paper argues that the theoretical framework of distributed cognition would greatly benefit the application of HF&E to manufacturing and would offer a more holistic understanding of the interactions between different entities within a greater context, including the social, cultural and materialistic. We aim to characterize and analyse manufacturing as a complex socio-technical system from a distributed cognition perspective; focusing on the use, mediation and integration of different forms of representations, tools and artefacts in this domain. We present illustrative examples from authentic manual assembly, showing the cognitively distributed nature of the work, ranging from scaffolding strategies of the individual worker to the emergent properties of a whole assembly line. The paper further proposes and provides benefits of using a distributed cognition framework as a novel approach in the toolbox for the HF&E discipline, where it may have been found before, but the application to manufacturing has been absent.

An Analysis of Cognitive Artifacts on Pre-service Teachers' Engineering Design Activity: a Distributed Cognition Perspective

The purpose of this study was to analyze the cognitive artifacts on pre-service teachers' engineering design activity from a distributed cognition perspective. For this study, a engineering design task was developed, which was evaluated by four science education experts. Data on production of external representation such as, verbal language, gestures, symbolic markings, diagrams, drawings were gathered as cognitive artifacts. Pre-service teachers created and used various types cognitive artifacts for communication, explanation, reasoning during a engineering design activity. These results clearly means that cognitive artifacts has a important role in the interaction between actors thereby, science class also need to be analyzed on distributed cognition perspective including variable cognitive artifacts.

Benefits of External Representations in Service Design: A Distributed Cognition Perspective

ABSTRACTA defining characteristic of service design is the use of external representations, which support designers in making intangible aspects of services accessible and shareable. Both current and future states are externally represented, using different service design techniques, for the purposes of articulating insights, learning, communicating, collaborating, and maintaining empathy for customers. The purposes of, and techniques for, making external representations were compared with benefits of using external representations to think, suggested by the theory of distributed cognition. The analysis indicated that the service design techniques could be divided into two groups: definite and ongoing. The analysis also revealed that none of the included techniques explicitly supported designers in making multiple simultaneous representations of services. The research contributes knowledge about how the externalizations relate to benefits of making external representations, and about how to choose and use different service design techniques based on theories of distributed and situated cognition.

Fair value accounting from a distributed cognition perspective

This study offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on fair value accounting. The growing influence of esoteric financial instruments whose valuation is becoming increasingly complex makes it necessary to focus on actual valuation practices. Based on an extensive review, this paper regards fair value accounting for complex financial instruments as involving processes distributed among actors located inside and/or outside a reporting entity. It also draws attention to collaboration by organizations that apply their external and internal resources to perform complex financial valuations. Furthermore, it demonstrates that cases involving unusual market conditions underline the importance of human interactions to the valuation process.

Loss prevention at the startup stage in process safety management: From distributed cognition perspective with an accident case study

Organizational artifacts such as rules, procedures, or codes of practice play important roles in chemical process safety management. The violation of an organizational artifact can lead to major accidents. It is thus essential to understand the underlying significance of violations to coordination of organizational artifacts. Currently, there are rapid changes and development of chemical products which require developing new process in chemical plants. The pre-startup stage in the chemical process is especially prone to errors due to ill-defined work processes and the variety of jobs involved at this stage. However, human errors and understandings in the stage have not been given much of attention it deserves. This paper focuses on human errors in pre-startup stage: (1) An analysis of major industrial accidents in Korea was conducted. (2) A survey of related personnel in chemical plants was carried out to understand conditions of safety management on human error. (3) An accident case study at the pre-startup stage in a Korean chemical plant was conducted by applying the Fault Tree Analysis method to reveal failures of coordination of organizational artifacts. This paper adopted distributed cognition theories to analyze the underlying implications of such failures because these theories have the power to examine the relationship between human operators and artifacts in a system.This study highlights the importance of considering organizational artifacts related to human error in safety management. The results may help people, who are related to a process of pre-startup stage in chemical plants, to improve safety of the work.

Overcoming the Biases of Microfoundationalism

The article makes four interrelated claims: (1) The mechanism approach to social explanation does not presuppose a commitment to the individual-level microfoundationalism. (2) The microfoundationalist requirement that explanatory social mechanisms should always consists of interacting individuals has given rise to problematic methodological biases in social research. (3) It is possible to specify a number of plausible candidates for social macro-mechanisms where interacting collective agents (e.g. formal organizations) form the core actors. (4) The distributed cognition perspective combined with organization studies could provide us with explanatory understanding of the emergent cognitive capacities of collective agents.

Using PVS to support the analysis of distributed cognition systems

The rigorous analysis of socio-technical systems is challenging, because people are inherent parts of the system, together with devices and artefacts. In this paper, we report on the use of PVS as a way of analysing such systems in terms of distributed cognition. Distributed cognition is a conceptual framework that allows us to derive insights about plausible user trajectories in socio-technical systems by exploring what information in the environment provides resources for user action, but its application has traditionally required substantial craft skill. DiCoT adds structure and method to the analysis of socio-technical systems from a distributed cognition perspective. In this work, we demonstrate how PVS can be used with DiCoT to conduct a systematic analysis. We illustrate how a relatively simple use of PVS can help a field researcher to (i) externalise assumptions and facts, (ii) verify the consistency of the logical argument framed in the descriptions, (iii) help uncover latent situations that may warrant further investigation, and (iv) verify conjectures about potential hazards linked to the observed use of information resources. Evidence is also provided that formal methods and empirical studies are not alternative approaches for studying a socio-technical system, but that they can complement and refine each other. The combined use of PVS and DiCoT is illustrated through a case study concerning a real-world emergency medical dispatch system.

Technostress in the office: a distributed cognition perspective on human–technology interaction

Technology is a mobile and integral part of many work places, and computers and other information and communication technology have made many users' work life easier, but technology can also contribute to problems in the cognitive work environment and, over time, create technostress. Much previous research on technostress has focused on the use of digital technology and its effects, measured by questionnaires, but in order to further examine how technostress arises in the modern workplace, a wider perspective on interactions between people and technology is needed. This paper applies a distributed cognition perspective to human---technology interaction, investigated through an observational field study. Distributed cognition focuses on the organisation of cognitive systems, and technostress in this perspective becomes an emergent phenomenon within a complex and dynamic socio-technical system. A well-established questionnaire was also used (for a limited sample), to gain a frame of reference for the results from the qualitative part of the study. The implications are that common questionnaire-based approaches very well can and should be complemented with a broader perspective to study causes of technostress. Based on the present study, a redefinition of technostress is also proposed.

Student Difficulties in Learning Density: A Distributed Cognition Perspective

Density has been reported as one of the most difficult concepts for secondary school students (e.g. Smith et al. 1997). Discussion about the difficulties of learning this concept has been largely focused on the complexity of the concept itself or student misconceptions. Few, if any, have investigated how the concept of density was constituted in classroom interactions, and what consequences these interactions have for individual students’ conceptual understanding. This paper reports a detailed analysis of two lessons on density in a 7th Grade Australian science classroom, employing the theory of Distributed Cognition (Hollan et al. 1999; Hutchins 1995). The analysis demonstrated that student understanding of density was shaped strongly by the public classroom discussion on the density of two metal blocks. It also revealed the ambiguities associated with the teacher demonstration and the student practical work. These ambiguities contributed to student difficulties with the concept of density identified in this classroom. The results of this study suggest that deliberate effort is needed to establish shared understanding not only about the purpose of the activities, but also about the meaning of scientific language and the utility of tools. It also suggests the importance of appropriate employment of instructional resources in order to facilitate student scientific understanding.

Information fusion in practice: A distributed cognition perspective on the active role of users

Traditionally, the focus of most information fusion research has been on computational aspects, as illustrated by, for example, different versions of the JDL data fusion model. Consequently, the human user has mainly been conceived as a relatively passive recipient of fused information. However, the importance of understanding the active role of human information processing in information fusion is gaining increasing recognition, as also reflected in discussions of a ”level 5” in the JDL model. This paper presents a case study of the interaction between human and machine information processing in a maritime surveillance control room. A detailed analysis of cognitive processes and information flows involved in identifying and tracking moving vessels illustrates how machines and human operators collaboratively perform fusion in a highly distributed fashion. The theoretical framework of distributed cognition provides an alternative or complementary way of analysing information fusion systems/processes that more clearly reveals the actual complexities of the interaction between human and machine information processing in practice.

Constructing preferences in the physical world: a distributed-cognition perspective on preferences and risky choices

Psychological research has firmly established that risk preferences are transient states shaped by past experiences, current knowledge, and feelings as well as the characteristics of the decision environment. We begin this article with a brief review of evidence supporting this conception as well as different psychological theories explaining how preferences are constructed. Next, we introduce the distributed perspective on human cognition and show how it may offer a promising framework for unifying seemingly incompatible accounts. We conclude by suggesting new directions for better capturing the essence of preference construction in laboratory research.

From ethnography to the EAST method: A tractable approach for representing distributed cognition in Air Traffic Control

Command and control is a generic activity involving the exercise of authority over assigned resources, combined with planning, coordinating and controlling how those resources are used. The challenge for understanding this type of activity is that it is not often amenable to the conventional experimental/methodological approach. Command and control tends to be multi-faceted (so requires more than one method), is made up of interacting socio and technical elements (so requires a systemic approach) and exhibits aggregate behaviours that emerge from these interactions (so requires methods that go beyond reductionism). In these circumstances a distributed cognition approach is highly appropriate yet the existing ethnographic methods make it difficult to apply and, for non-specialist audiences, sometimes difficult to meaningfully interpret. The Event Analysis for Systemic Teamwork method is put forward as a means of working from a distributed cognition perspective but in a way that goes beyond ethnography. A worked example from Air Traffic Control is used to illustrate how the language of social science can be translated into the language of systems analysis. Statement of Relevance: Distributed cognition provides a highly appropriate conceptual response to complex work settings such as Air Traffic Control. This paper deals with how to realise those benefits in practice without recourse to problematic ethnographic techniques.