Week 7 Flashcards
(23 cards)
Understanding Cognition
Involves a brain in a body in a culturally, socially, and technologically constructed world
Cantor’s Digital Proof
Georg Cantor devised a proof that the real numbers are not countably infinite.
String Around the World
Wrap a string around the world and a basketball at the equator, to move it up a foot, the additional length for the string is the same
Thinking
Not something that happens exclusively in the head.
Thinking is a situated social activity that exploits the extraordinary facilities of language, representational media, and embodied interaction with the world and other people.
Computers
To assist thought, communication, collaboration, and social interaction
New type of computers
Smartphones ~ internet, web, AI
Geoff Hinton
Warns of risks from AI he helped create
Design of Everyday Things
Examine not only the visible features of designed objects but also the less visible features of process and interaction, the implicit and explicit ways design influences our interaction with the world and each other.
Fundamental to design
Knowing more about what people do
Behaviorism
Dominant paradigm in Psych 1920 - 1970
- measure what was observable to everyone
- focus on stimuli and responses
- missing causal role for mind/brain in manipulating, storing, and processing information
Cognitive Revolution
Computers allowed people to reconceive cognition as computation.
- the brain seen as a computer that performed information processing
- Brain -> Hardware
- Mind -> Software
Cognitivism
Beyond explored the casual role of thoughts and mental functions
- cognition was symbolic representations in the brain, using some innate syntax or logic
First Gen Cognitive Science
Ignored the roles of context, culture, history, and emotion
Distributed Cognition
The idea that cognition if fundamentally distributed beyond the individual person
Post - Cognitivism
Pursuing the idea that cognition isn’t limited to what happens in the brain
Dr. Edwin Hutchins
Goal: Study human cognition in its social, cultural, and material context
- cognitive anthropologist
- cultural groups as systems
- ethnographic research
- later navigation
Dr. Hutchins - Navigation
While observing a US Navy ship
- individuals worked together as a team to form a socio-technological cognitive system
- cognitive activity distributed among members and equipment used
- > first formalized principles of Distributed Cog
Cognitive Systems
Include memory, decision making, inference, learning, attention, etc
-> characterized in terms of how they propagate and transform representations
Three kinds of distributions of cognitive process
- distributed across coordinated activity between internal and external structures
- distributed across members of a social group
- distributed through time (earlier events transform later events)
Distributed Cognition and Marr’s levels
Personal level or socio-cultural level, where a cognitive process is distributed
Ethnographic research
To capture some socio-cultural phenomenon from the perspective of the member
- maximizing ecological validity
Cognitive Ethnography
Still to capture all the dynamic activity as it naturally occurs but with emphasis on how technology or representations are manipulated during interactions
- tells what people actually do/ will do
Five Contributions of Cognitive Ethnography
1) Understanding the nature of cognitive ecosystems
2) An improved functional specification for the human cognitive system
3) Documents the distribution of cognitive processes across space, time, and society
4) Informs experimental studies of cognition
5) Informs design of environments and materials for thinking
