Distributed cognition

Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that deploys models of the extended mind (see, for example, the paper The Extended Mind) by taking as the fundamental unit of analysis "a collection of individuals and artefacts and their relations to each other in a particular work practice" (Rogers and Ellis, 1994 ). "DCog" is a specific approach to distributed cognition (distinct from other meanings) which takes a computational perspective towards goal-based activity systems. Dcog frameworks employed were originally developed in the mid-1980s by Edwin Hutchins, who continues to be the leading pioneer and whose research is based at the University of California at San Diego.

Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf. cultural-historical psychology) it emphasizes the ways that cognition is off-loaded into the environment through social and technological means. It is a framework for studying cognition rather than a type of cognition. This framework involves the coordination between individuals, artifacts and the environment. According to Zhang & Norman (1994), the distributed cognition approach has three key components:

'Dcog' studies the "propagation of representational states across media" (Rogers and Ellis, ibid.). Mental content is considered to be non-reducible to individual cognition and is more properly understood as off-loaded and extended into the environment, where information is also made available to other agents (Heylighen, Heath, & Overwalle, 2003). It is often understood as an approach in specific opposition to earlier and still prevalent "brain in a vat" models which ignore "situatedness, embodiment and enaction" as key to any cognitive act (Ibid.).

These representation-based frameworks consider distributed cognition as "a cognitive system whose structures and processes are distributed between internal and external representations, across a group of individuals, and across space and time" (Zhang and Patel, 2006). In general terms, they consider a distributed cognition system to have two components: internal and external representations. In their description, internal representations are knowledge and structure in individuals' minds while external representations are knowledge and structure in the external environment (Zhang, 1997b; Zhang and Norman, 1994).

DCog studies the ways that memories, facts, or knowledge is embedded in the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. DCog is a useful approach for (re)designing the technologically mediated social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment, and the media channels with which people interact, either in order to communicate with each other, or socially coordinate to perform complex tasks. Distributed cognition views a system of cognition as a set of representations propagated through specific media, and models the interchange of information between these representational media. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.

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