Distributed Cognition
The Basic Idea
What goes into making sure a plane takes off in time?
There are many people, systems, and actions required; cooperation and coordination are essential.1 Pilots and crew members work together to prepare the plane and its passengers, communicating with each other as the necessary steps are completed. Hundreds of sensors and machinery are in operation. Together, this complex system of people and machinery allows a plane to take off in time.
This is one example of what cognitive scientists call “distributed cognition.”2 The core idea is that knowledge and cognition not only exist within oneself, but also in one’s social and physical environments. Our memory, decision making, reasoning, and learning are all collectively processed by our minds and by extensions of our minds in the external world.
This is a radical departure from the traditional idea that cognition exists only within the mind or the brain.3 Distributed cognition extends the reach of what is considered cognition (or, at least, what is involved in it) to include interactions between people and things in one’s environment.4 It is not a kind of cognition,4 but a new way of viewing how cognition works.3
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.
– Edwin Hutchins, cognitive scientist and author of Cognition in the Wild
