Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial ...

From the perspective of cognitive science, it is illuminating to think of much contemporary scientific research as taking place in distributed cognitive systems. This is particularly true of large-scale experimental and observational systems such as the Hubble Telescope. Clark, Hutchins, Knorr-Cetina, and Latour insist or imply such a move requires expanding our notions of knowledge, mind, and even consciousness. Whether this is correct seems to me not a straightforward factual question. Rather, the issue seems to be how best to develop (...) a theoretical understanding of such systems appropriate to the study of science and technology. I argue that there is no need to attribute to such systems as a whole any form of cognitive agency. We can well understand the importance of such systems while restricting agency to the human components. The implication is that we think of these large-scale distributed cognitive systems not so much as unified wholes, but as hybrid systems including both physical artifacts and ordinary humans. (shrink)

Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In commercial aviation, for example, the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that typically includes two or more (...) pilots interacting with each other and with a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoretical framework that takes a distributed, socio‐technical system rather than an individual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framework is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information is represented and how representations are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them. (shrink)

In cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to produce images of brain functions. These images play a central role in the practice of neuroscience. In this paper we are interested in how these brain images become understandable and meaningful for scientists. In order to explore this problem we observe how scientists use such semiotic resources as gesture, language, and material structure present in the socially and culturally constituted environment. A micro-analysis of video records of scientists interacting with each (...) other and with fMRI images reveals action as cognition, that is, actions that constitute thinking for the scientists. (shrink)

Aims to undo this figure-ground relationship between cognitive and social processes. The chapters in Part One, by developmental, social, and educational psychologists and an anthropologist, explore the role of the immediate social situation in cognition, offering challenges from the mild to the deeply unsettling to psychologists' traditional assumptions about cognition, competence, and performance. In Part Two, chapters by a psychologist/anthropologist explore from a linguistic perspective the various and often hidden ways in which the social permeates thinking, especially by shaping the (...) forms of reasoning and language use available to members of a community. Part Three contains three chapters by psycholinguists, a sociologist, and social psychologists that examine the way language functions in face-to-face communication. Part Four, in chapters by an anthropologist, developmental psychologists, and social psychologists, examines the sources, individual and social, of shared cultural knowledge. Part Five contains chapters by an anthropologist and by social and cognitive psychologists examining the structure and processes of cognitive collaboration in work situations. In Part Six, several chapters by developmental psychologists consider the individual in sociocognitive activity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)