Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, linguistic, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales which we distinguish for analytic purposes with the terms ‘coordination’, ‘collaboration’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘culture’, so as better to study their interanimation in practice. As an illustrative example of the complementary timescales involved in joint remembering in a real-world activity, we present a (...) micro-qualitative analysis of an interactional sequence in which two members of a fourperson team of video designers crafted a memory- scaffolding tool. In order to find the temporal structure of the crafting of the memory-scaffolding tool, we used software for pattern recognition. The analysis suggests that coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture reveal complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which should be considered as complex phenomenon unfolding at multiple interanimating timescales. (shrink)

Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history (...) of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of literature, I introduce two new concepts for understanding and exploring distributed cognition: resilience engineering and degeneracy. By re-examining Ed Hutchins’ (1995) ethnographic study of the navigation team I show how a focus on the developmental acquisition of cognitive practices can draw out several crucial insights that have been overlooked. Firstly, that the way in which agents learn and acquire cognitive practices enables a form of resilience engineering: the process by which the system is able to (...) overcome and adapt to errors and the vagaries of nature. Secondly, that the best way to engineer a resilient system is through promoting degeneracy – how differing structures produce the same function – at the level of cognitive practices. These two features show that focusing on cognitive practices and developmental trajectories is important for both greater explanatory leverage; and is also useful in regard to the practicalities of designing real-world cognitive systems. (shrink)

Norrick focuses on the interactional aspects of conversational remembering in everyday situations. He examines the ways in which the narrators’ uncertainty leads to collaboration from interlocutors in conversational remembering and how such co‐construction of memories can instantiate instances of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995).

The aim of our introduction is to present the reader with key concepts and paradigms that have been rigorously developed to empirically investigate the dynamics and outcomes of conversational remembering in cognitive research.

Collaborative remembering is essential to enabling teams to build shared understanding of projects and their progress. This article presents an analysis of collaborative remembering sequences in a corpus of interactions collected in a workplace where a team of designers developed a video television commercial. On the basis of coding and analysing linguistic and bodily behaviors in 158 such sequences, extracted from over 45 hours of video recordings, recurrent patterns of collaborative remembering processes were identified, relating to the interplay of work (...) roles. This article shows that collaborative remembering in the design studio is structured by behavioural, interactive and social factors. (shrink)

To advance understanding of the mechanisms allowing for team coordination (TC) in complex motor actions, we conducted a qualitative study with eight elite hand-to-hand circus acrobats. Data collection consisted of field observations, an open-ended interview with the participants’ head coach, and focus group interviews with all acrobats. Data analysis yielded three higher order themes: TC, collective efficacy (CE), and TC-CE linkage. Teammates’ shared and complementary mental models, as well as implicit and explicit communication dynamics, emerged as formative sub-themes of TC; (...) self-efficacy and other’s-efficacy emerged as reflective sub-themes of CE. Our findings also suggest that TC is likely inter-related to CE in a systemic fashion. Practitioners should encourage the development of both shared and complementary models of thinking, while promoting verbal and non-verbal communication skills. Finally, increasing teammates’ confidence in themselves and in their teammates can help in the development of CE as well as the enhancement of TC. (shrink)