Is Distributed Cognition Group Level Cognition?

Is Distributed Cognition Group Level Cognition ?

This paper shows that recent arguments from group problem solving and task performance to emergent group level cognition that rest on the social parity and related principles are invalid or question begging. The paper shows that standard attributions of problem solving or task performance to groups require only multiple agents of the outcome, not a group agent over and above its members, whethe...

Group Cognition

Distributed Cognition

Like all other branches of cognitive science, distributed cognition seeks to understand the organization of cognitive systems. Like most of cognitive science, it takes cognitive processes to be those that are involved in memory, decision making, inference, reasoning, learning, and so on. Also following mainstream cognitive science, it characterizes cognitive processes in terms of the propagatio...

15 Scientific cognition as distributed cognition

After introducing several different approaches to distributed cognition, I consider the application of these ideas to modern science, especially the role of instrumentation and visual representations in science. I then examine several apparent difficulties with taking distributed cognition seriously. After arguing that these difficulties are only apparent, I note the ease with which distributed...

Distributed Cognition without Distributed Knowing

In earlier works (2002, 2006), I have argued that it is useful to think of much scientific activity, particularly in experimental sciences, as involving the operation of distributed cognitive systems, since these are understood in the contemporary cognitive sciences. Introducing a notion of distributed cognition, however, invites consideration of whether, or in what way, related cognitive activ...