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Week 8 A05

Distributed cognition & Design

TA: Sean Huang

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Each group choose 1 note-taker, public one post on padlet per question (be concise, visible). Canvas submission: everyone

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Cognition

All forms of knowing and awareness, such as perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining, and problem solving.

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Distributed Cognition

What is distributed cognition?

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Distributed Cognition

Distributed Cognition:

To understand the coordination “among individuals and artifacts, that is, to understand how individual agents align and share within a distributed process” (Nardi, 1996, p. 39)

Space: “How we manage the spatial arrangement of items around us… is an integral part of the way we think.” (Kirsh, 1995)

Culture: “Distributed cognition sees real-world cognition as a process that involves the interaction of the consequences of past experience (for individual, group, and material world) with the affordances of the present.” (Hollan et al., 2000)

Context: “Non-biological external resources (technologies, media, places…etc.) vary on a whole range of dimensions … transmissibility across instantiations, capacity as symbol systems, the constraints on the ways in which information can be retrieved, the context-dependence of their use…” (Sutton, 2006)[Edited]

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Distributed Cognition

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Why?

Why do we need to distribute our cognition?

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Why?

  • Efficiency, development, survival
  • Socialize, communicate
  • We are incapable (lol). Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) - An individual only has limited cognitive resources to process information. WM, LTM limitation (capacity theory).

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Ways we distribute our cognition

What are some ways we distribute our cognition? What are some real-life examples?

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Ways we distribute our cognition

  • Cognitive offloading (drawing, writing)
  • Design and interaction (Jane’s app)
  • Architecture (shelter and culture)
  • Tools (ChatGPT)

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What could we do to upgrade?

What are some daily items we can upgrade/improve based on our understanding of how knowledge is distributed?

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What could we do to upgrade?

  • UC Berkeley graduate application system
  • Cogsci building (Courtyard, levels)

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What can we do to make our instructors better?

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