The following values have no corresponding Zotero field: PB - JSTOR.

The objective of this essay is to provide the beginning of a principled classification of some of the ways space is intelligently used. Studies of planning have typically focused on the temporal ordering of action, leaving as unaddressed questions of where to lay down instruments, ingredients, work-in-progress, and the like. But, in having a body, we are spatially located creatures: we must always be facing some direction, have only certain objects in view, be within reach of certain others. How we (...) manage the spatial arrangement of items around us is not an afterthought: it is an integral part of the way we think, plan, and behave. The proposed classification has three main categories: spatial arrangements that simplify choice; spatial arrangements that simplify perception; and spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation. The data for such a classification is drawn from videos of cooking, assembly and packing, everyday observations in supermarkets, workshops and playrooms, and experimental studies of subjects playing Tetris, the computer game. This study, therefore, focuses on interactive processes in the medium and short term: on how agents set up their workplace for particular tasks, and how they continuously manage that workplace. (shrink)

Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity (...) producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporateeverything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments. (shrink)

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.

Watts, one of the principal architects of network theory, sets out to explain the innovative research that he and other scientists are spearheading to create a blueprint of this connected planet.

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)

As a full expression of techne, the information society has already posed fundamental ethical problems, whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidlyevolving. What is the best strategy to construct an information society that is ethically sound? This is the question I discuss in this paper. The task is to formulate aninformation ethics that can treat the world of data, information, knowledge and communication as a new environment, the infosphere. This information ethics must be able to address and solve the ethical (...) challenges arising in the new environment on the basis of the fundamental principles of respect for information, its conservation and valorisation. It must be an ecological ethics for the information environment. (shrink)

Essays discuss poetry, communication, television, form, aesthetics, bad taste, and art.

Among the many contested boundaries in science studies is that between the cognitive and the social. Here, we are concerned to question this boundary from a perspective within the cognitive sciences based on the notion of distributed cognition. We first present two of many contemporary sources of the notion of distributed cognition, one from the study of artificial neural networks and one from cognitive anthropology. We then proceed to reinterpret two well-known essays by Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with (...) Eyes and Hands’ and ‘Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest’. In both cases we find the cognitive and the social merged in a system of distributed cognition without any appeal to agonistic encounters. For us, results do not come to be regarded as veridical because they are widely accepted; they come to be widely accepted because, in the context of an appropriate distributed cognitive system, their apparent veracity can be made evident to anyone with the capacity to understand the workings of the system. (shrink)

Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) Moore’s law states that computational complexity of the models is still far below that and artificial life (Alife) are interested resources for a fixed price roughly double of any living system. New experiments in evo- in understanding the properties of liv- every 18 months. From about 1975 into the lution simulate spatially isolated populations ing organisms so that they can build artificial early 1990s all the gains of Moore’s law went to investigate speciation. Over the (...) past few systems that exhibit these properties for into the changeover from the centralized years, new directions have emerged in AI⁵, in useful purposes. AI researchers are interest- mainframe to the individual computer on attempts to implement artificial creatures in ed mostly in perception, cognition and your desk, accommodating a vastly simulated or physical environments. generation of action (Box 1), whereas Alife increased number of users. The amount of Often called the behaviour-based focuses on evolution, reproduction, computing power available to the individual approach, this new mode of thought involves morphogenesis and metabolism (Box 2). scientist did not change that much, although the connection of perception to action with Neither of these disciplines is a conventional the price came down by a factor of a little in the way of intervening representa- science; rather, they are a mixture of science thousand. But since the early 1990s, all of tional systems. Rather than relying on and engineering. Despite, or perhaps Moore’s law has gone into increasing the per- search, this approach relies on the correct because of, this hybrid structure, both disci- formance of the workstation itself. short, fast connections being present plines have been very successful and our And both AI and Alife have benefited from between sensory and motor modules. world is full of their products. this shift. Behaviour-based approaches began with Every time we use a computer we use Increased computer power has enabled insect models, but more recently they have algorithms and techniques developed by AI search-based AI to push ahead with been extended to humanoid robots⁶ — researchers. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to that part of science studies known as 'the cognitive study of science'. The general goal of such studies is to understand cogni-.