Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Distributed Cognition

The term distributed cognition has been employed in a variety of theoretical perspectives, both in a weaker sense as a metaphor for coordinated social activity, as well as in more theoretically substantial forms in which the elements of the extended system act as a physical architecture for cognition. This entry will cover distributed cognition's historical development within the social and cognitive sciences, orientation, areas of application, theoretical foundations, and methods of investigation.

Origins and Orientation

In its most fully fleshed out form, distributed cognition (or DCog) was developed primarily in University of California San Diego's Department of Cognitive Science, by Edwin Hutchins at the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. Its development alongside human-computer interaction is an important one, and it has been extensively used and promoted by this wider community, most notably by the psychologist and popular writer, Donald Norman. Analyses applying distributed cognition have been carried out on a variety of systems, including airline cockpits, air traffic control, ship navigation, computer programming, medical informatics, construction, and trawl fishing. Distributed cognition is closely related to activity theory (from which it has developed some of its terminology), situated action, and situated cognition. All of these emphasize the importance of the (external) context of the activity to varying degrees.

DCog expands the focus of cognitive activity away from the individual acting alone and unsupported, toward a system of people and tools as a unit of analysis. In its original conception, it was developed as a corrective to the forms of cognitive science prevalent at that time, which focused entirely on the individual mind working in isolation. In opposition to this, DCog attempts to show how cognition is both a social and a cultural process and that traditional cognitive science may be attributing intelligence to internal mental structures when this is not the case. DCog may occur through enlisting external tools (e.g., through the use of a calculator, pen and paper, or maps) or by enlisting other actors in the problem-solving task. DCog also offers analytic and practical potential, showing how a system's organization and other resources and constraints are assembled to produce intelligent action; these insights can be utilized in redesigning the structure and materials of these activity systems.

Probing the Sociocultural Components of Cognition

DCog retains the emphasis on information processing and problem solving developed from cognitive science, yet extends this approach to larger and distributed systems of activity that are situated in the real world and sensed and enacted through physical mechanisms. One concern dominates this, and draws from a largely neglected strand in cognitive science—culture—connecting the understandings, roles, and relationships between the human elements in the activity, or functional, system, and how it is shaped by the history of interaction between elements (human and nonhuman) within the system, drawing strongly from the cultural-historical tradition of activity theory. In the form of activity theory developed at the Moscow Institute of Psychology by Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria and refined by Alexei Leont'ev, many psychological processes are best understood as culturally and historically embedded by dint of being activity processes structured through communities of practice rather than as individual decisions determined independently by those involved. This perspective is developed further in DCog, which claims that most environments have what Hutchins calls a “cognitive ecology;” that is, they are sociocultural constructions, not arbitrary natural settings but artificially structured to support DCog processes.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution