{"id":7,"date":"2011-10-23T11:56:05","date_gmt":"2011-10-23T18:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sociallearning512\/?page_id=7"},"modified":"2011-11-07T09:41:52","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T16:41:52","slug":"distributed-cognition","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sociallearning512\/distributed-cognition\/","title":{"rendered":"Distributed Cognition"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The emphasis on finding and describing “knowledge structures” that are somewhere “inside” the individual encourages us to overlook the fact that human cognition is always situated in a complex sociocultural world and cannot be unaffected by it.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>(Hutchins, 1995, p. xiii)<\/p>\n

Over the 20th century, many have explored the question “how can the cognitive processes we normally associate with an individual mind be implemented in a group of individuals?”\u00a0\u00a0All the discussions converged towards the idea that “the cognitive properties of a group can differ from the cognitive properties of the members of the group” (Hutchins, 2000, p. 4).<\/p>\n

Ed Hutchins<\/a><\/strong> has spent his “academic carreer trying to understand human cognition in social, cultural and material context”. He “believe[s] that cultural practices are a key component of human cognition”. In the mid 80s, he and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diago, developed the Distributed Cognitive theory\u2013a psychological theory\u2013where he claimed “that cognition is better understood as a distributed phenomenon” (Rogers, 1997, p. 1).\u00a0 Cognition in the Wild<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (MIT Press, 1995) is\u00a0Hutchins’ first attempt at a coherent statement of the principles of distributed cognition.<\/p>\n

According to Rogers (1997),\u00a0 “distributed cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social and organisational perspective” (p. 1).\u00a0 The approach considers the “distributed nature of cognitive phenomena across individuals, artefacts and internal and external representations in terms of a common language of ‘representational states’ and ‘media'” (p. 2).<\/p>\n

Therefore, using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky, the theory emphasizes the social aspects of cognition.<\/p>\n