Depending on their organization, groups must have cognitive properties that are not predictable from a knowledge of the properties of the individuals in the group. 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.
The phrase "cognition in the wild" refers to human cognition in its natural habitat - that is, to naturally occurring culturally constituted human activity.
Instead, I have in mind the distinction between the laboratory, where cognition is studied in captivity, and the everyday world, where human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings. I hope to evoke with this metaphor a sense of an ecology of thinking in which human cognition interacts with an environment rich in organizing resources.
-Edwin Hutchins "Cognition in the Wild"
(my professor- the father of Distributed Cognition according to Wiki... only he is not fond of the wiki page... very not fond of it)
Sunday, October 18, 2009
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