Distributed Cognition

History of DC

The discipline of distributed cognition draws on a wide variety of works and areas of scholarship. Pioneers in anthropology such as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Benjamin Whorf all attempted to understand culturally determined cognitive structures people use to make sense of their worlds (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Vygotsky likely was the first psychologically trained writer to introduce the notion that culture influences our thinking, and to posit that tools (physical and mental devices designed to enhance cognition) enable human beings to cope with a very wide range of abstract problems (Vygotsky, 1980). Latour’s seminal work on how modern, Western scientific thought cannot be understood without invoking an ecological understanding of the relationship between culture and artifacts used to solve problems has also influenced many examinations of distributed cognition (Latour, 1986).

The discipline as it exists today emerged after ethnographic methods were used to answer questions about how cognitive tasks are distributed in real-world environments (Hutchins, 2003).

Perhaps the most influential work that combined an explicit devotion to ethnographic methods with an avowed adoption of a distributed perspective on cognition was the seminal 1995 text by anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins spent time aboard the USS Palau, a U.S. Navy helicopter carrier. By gathering video, audio, and field-note data, Hutchins was able to formulate specific ideas about how the crew members handled complex tasks such as berthing a ship of several thousand tons (at the time of the study, navigational aids such as GPS did not exist). Hutchins reached the conclusion that the cognitive load required to complete such tasks was distributed across a number of individual minds. Further, culturally determined structures had evolved to ensure the process went as smoothly as possible; for example, Hutchins found that the act of decision making was strictly divided among several people. “Culture” (in this instance, a shared set of principles and procedures for guiding behavior and thought) was also found to influence methods for representing and transmitting information between thinkers. Finally, the cognitive, problem-solving system seemed to work efficiently because all the members participating therein had developed some measure of intersubjectivity (i.e. they used similar, common frameworks for interpreting events and one another’s behavior).

...