Mind and Artifact: A Multidimensional Matrix for Exploring Cognition-Artifact Relations

What are the possible varieties of cognitionartifact relations, and which dimensions are relevant for exploring these varieties? This question is answered in two steps. First, three levels of functional and informational integration between human agent and cognitive artifact are distinguished. These levels are based on the degree of interactivity and direction of information flow, and range from monocausal and bicausal relations to continuous reciprocal causation. Second, a multidimensional framework for exploring cognitionartifact relations is sketched. The dimensions in the framework include reliability, durability, trust, procedural and representational transparency, individualization, bandwidth, speed of information flow, distribution of computation, and cognitive and artifactual transformation. Together, these dimensions constitute a multidimensional space in which particular cognition-artifact relations can be located. The higher a cognition-artifact relation scores on these dimensions, the more integration occurs, and the more tightly coupled the overall system is. It is then better, for explanatory reasons, to see agent and artifact as one cognitive system with a distributed informational architecture.