Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins
Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins (full text Cognet pdf, free on some campuses, from MIT):
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open-ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation - its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory - "in the wild". 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. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that differ from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them.
The Librarything tag cloud for this book right now says
anthropology(1) cog psych(1) Cognition(2) cognitive science(3) distributed cognition(1) ethnographic(1) interaction(1) learning(1) natural history(1) navagation(1) organisational learning(1) psychology(1)
Hutchins article on Distributed Cognition in an Airline Cockpit has a good detailed example of this approach in use:
The excerpt of cockpit activity presented above is only approximately one
and a half minutes in duration, yet it is very rich. It contains within it
illustrations of many of the central concepts of a theory of distributed cognition.
We will present and discuss these concepts by going through the elements of the
example in chronological order and noting what the events in this example tell
us about the nature of this particular system and about systems of distributed
cognition in general




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