A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists.

This chapter describes how the distributed cognition perspective directs attention to particular classes of interactions. It uses the examination of an example of real-world human interaction to construct a description of the nature of interaction. The chapter shows real-world interaction to be deeply multimodal and composed of a complex network of relationships among resources. It also shows that some cognitive processes are properties of the system of interaction, distinct from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in the system. Humans inhabit a cognitive ecology that contains many sorts of cognitive resources. Some of these are physical objects, some are cultural practices, and some are mental models. Cognitive effects emerge from the interaction of persons with the rich cultural content of the cognitive ecology. The individual and institutional knowledge of ship’s position is produced by the activity of a complex system involving interaction among persons and complex culturally organized material media.

Systems for detecting and tracking social marine mammals, including dolphins, can provide data to help explain their social dynamics, predict their behavior, and measure the impact of human interference. Data collected from video surveillance methods can be consistently and systematically sampled for studies of behavior, and frame-by-frame analyses can uncover insights impossible to observe from real-time, freely occurring natural behavior. Advances in boat-based, aerial, and underwater recording platforms provide opportunities to document the behavior of marine mammals and create massive datasets. The use of human experts to detect, track, identify individuals, and recognize activity in video demands significant time and financial investment. This paper examines automated methods designed to analyze large video corpora containing marine mammals. While research is converging on best solutions for some automated tasks, particularly detection and classification, many research domains are ripe for exploration.

Detecting and tracking social marine mammals, including bottlenose dolphins, can help to explain their social dynamics, predict their behavior, and measure the impact of human interference. Multi-camera setups provide an opportunity to record the behavior of captive dolphins and create a massive dataset from which long term statistics can be extracted, but the use of human experts to track dolphin positions over time demands a high time and financial investment cost. In this paper, we examine automated methods to analyze large video corpora. We use background subtraction to detect dolphins over time in the video data and to visualize the paths by which dolphins regularly traverse their environment. We demonstrate the use of these background subtraction methods as a way to initialize a preexisting real-time compressive tracking algorithm, which previously required human interaction. Detecting when dolphins transfer between pools both supplements 3D tracking efforts, helping identify moments when dolphins move between cameras, and augments human performance, providing a way for researchers to manually annotate dolphin pool positions 14 times as fast.

As part of our research on multimodal analysis and visualization of activity dynamics, we are exploring the integration of data produced by a variety of sensor technologies within ChronoViz, a tool aimed at supporting the simultaneous visualization of multiple streams of time series data. This paper reports on the integration of a mobile eye-tracking system with data streams collected from HD video cameras, microphones, digital pens, and simulation environments. We focus on the challenging environment of the commercial airline flight deck, analyzing the use of mobile eye tracking systems in aviation human factors and reporting on techniques and methods that can be applied in this and other domains in order to successfully collect, analyze and visualize eye-tracking data in combination with the array of data types supported by ChronoViz.

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson's ecological psychology, Bateson's ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science.

This paper reviews the uneven history of the relationship between Anthropology and Cognitive Science over the past 30 years, from its promising beginnings, followed by a period of disaffection, on up to the current context, which may lay the groundwork for reconsidering what Anthropology and (the rest of) Cognitive Science have to offer each other. We think that this history has important lessons to teach and has implications for contemporary efforts to restore Anthropology to its proper place within Cognitive Science. The recent upsurge of interest in the ways that thought may shape and be shaped by action, gesture, cultural experience, and language sets the stage for, but so far has not fully accomplished, the inclusion of Anthropology as an equal partner.

In the aviation human factors literature, situation awareness (SA) is usually described as arising from disembodied mental processes. Action has virtually no role in current theories of SA. This disembodied view is out of step with contemporary theories that take cognitive processes to be distributed, situated, and above all, embodied. This shift in theory suggests that SA ought to be an embodied phenomenon, and given the highly spatial nature of SA, it would be quite surprising to discover that the body did not play a key role in the construction, elaboration, and maintenance of SA. In this paper we examine the construction of elements of SA in ongoing flight training conducted in a light jet. We show that flight instructors and students make extensive use of their bodies and the relations of their bodies to surrounding space while constructing, remembering, and reasoning about the situation of the airplane.

Author(s): Anderson, John R.; McClelland, James L.; Smith, Linda B.; Hutchins, Edwin; Barsalou, Lawrence W.; Gentner, Dedre; Forbus, Kenneth D,; Bechtel, William; Newport, Elissa L.; Medin, Douglas L.

Innate cognitive capacities are orchestrated by cultural practices to produce high-level cognitive processes. In human activities, examples of this phenomenon range from everyday inferences about space and time to the most sophisticated reasoning in scientific laboratories. A case is examined in which chimpanzees enter into cultural practices with humans (in experiments) in ways that appear to enable them to engage in symbol-mediated thought. Combining the cultural practices perspective with the theories of embodied cognition and enactment suggests that the chimpanzees' behaviour is actually mediated by non-symbolic representations. The possibility that non-human primates can engage in cultural practices that give them the appearance of symbol-mediated thought opens new avenues for thinking about the coevolution of human culture and human brains.

Effective collaboration requires the creation and maintenance of common ground understandings (Clark, 1992). This is an especially interesting problem in the case of intercultural collaboration, where communicative conventions may not be shared. However, intercultural collaboration often takes place in professionally relevant material settings and among people who share professional competence. This paper discusses ethnographic field data which we collected at the Boeing/Alteon training center in Renton, WA, where Japanese airline pilots received flight training from American flight instructors. We attempt to clarify how the pilots and the instructors effectively use multimodal representations to achieve intercultural common ground understandings.

It has been proposed that computer-based technologies will soon replace paper documents in the commercial airline flight deck. This article describes the nature of paper-use practices in the present-day flight deck. We hope that an improved understanding of the roles currently played by paper documents will contribute to more effective design of the systems that will replace or complement them. To this end, we conducted a series of ethnographic studies at airlines in Japan and New Zealand. Our research shows that work practices involving paper play a role in the planning of information access, the management of attention, and the establishment and maintenance of shared understandings between pilots. We anticipate that in the future paper will not be regarded as just a vestige of earlier practices that has somehow continued to survive, but rather will be an integral feature of new technology systems.

Human interaction is complex. An embodied perspective on interaction shows that it is richly multimodal. The complexity of the interaction system allows for a surprising variety of emergent cognitive effects. This paper attempts to place the cognitive life of things in the context of rich multimodal interactions. Part I: The cognitive life of things is manifest in the ways people jointly engage things with their bodies and their words In the last chapter of Cognition in the Wild (Hutchins, 1995), I argue that cognitive science made a fundamental category error when it mistook the properties of a person in interaction with a social and material world for the cognitive properties of whatever is inside the person. One enduring problem with this claim is that it demands a description of how cognitive properties arise from the interaction of person with social and material world. Cognition in the Wild provides a profoundly incomplete answer to this question. In the years since it’s publication, Cognition in the Wild has been criticized for saying so little about the people in the navigation setting. It describes the tools of the trade, and the historical development of the tools. It describes social processes and the cognitive properties of those social processes, but it says almost nothing about the embodied practices of the navigators as flesh-and-blood people. For the most part, the cognitive processes described in Cognition in the Wild, and in other treatments of distributed cognition, are presented without reference to the role of the body in thinking. That is, in spite of the fact that distributed cognition claims that the interaction of people with things is a central phenomenon of cognition, the approach has remained oddly disembodied. The multimodality of verbal behavior For the past three months, I have been teaching my undergraduate course on the methods of cognitive ethnography. Late in the quarter we transcribe and analyze spoken discourse. When dealing with language materials, the students learn that everyday language is complex. The transcription methods we use (borrowed from Gail Jefferson (1984)) capture the words that are spoken, but also focus attention on super-segmental features of timing, prosody, stress patterns; the aspects of language that are most affected by the fact that speech is produced by a body in action. We seem to forget sometimes that speaking is an embodied activity. After transcribing at the word and morpheme level, I try to help the students see the morphological, lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic organization of talk. Then I have students identify the cultural models that account for the discourse level organization of the talk. What underlying assumptions hold the parts of a discourse together? By the time they have done this, it is apparent that verbal behavior is richly multimodal in the sense that it integrates many layers of structure, each consisting of a distinct set of patterns, and all coordinated with one another by a very complex set of relations. The richness of embodied interaction For the final project in the course, I have the students collect, transcribe, and analyze video recording of realworld interaction (often in a work setting). Students are often astonished to discover how much more complex video records of interaction are than audio records of spoken narratives. In addition to talk, video recordings include the bodies of the participants, and the world that the interactants co-inhabit. I show my students a diagram (figure 1) to illustrate the increased richness of the video data compared to audio. Figure 1: A multi-modal interaction system Just as there are multiple complex patterns in verbal behavior, there are also multiple complex patterns in the deployment of the body (hand gestures, of course, but also other limbs, body orientation, head position and motion, eye-gaze, facial expression, and more) and often very complex patterns (arrays of things) in the world that the interactants share. Furthermore, with the additional elements come new relationships among the elements. Some of these relationships have already spawned entire Body Talk World Action Reference Gesture fields of inquiry: co-speech gesture, environmentallycoupled gesture, and reference for example. This growing appreciation for the cognitive importance of the details of body-world interactions owes a lot to the availability of inexpensive digital video. Frame-by-frame examination of interactions of people with one another and with their environments for thinking makes it possible to see previously hidden detail. The diagram and this discussion are gross oversimplifications, of course. The uses of the body are also richly multimodal (as we will see below), as are interactions with the world. Thus each mode depicted in the multi-modal system diagram is itself a multi-modal system. Situating embodied interaction in the social world The diagram in figure 1 is also an oversimplification because it leaves out the embodied nature of social interactions. For the most part, when people engage things cognitively, they do so in social contexts. Consider the added complexity that comes when we consider interaction systems in which multiple actors are engaged in joint activity. Addressing the embodied nature of social interaction requires a change to the diagram. Rather than a single body and a single stream of talk, we now have two bodies, and two streams of talk, and a single shared world as shown in figure 2. I call this diagram the “square-cut gem” because of its inverted tetrahedron shape. Figure 2: A square-cut gem of interaction Now, instead of adding new elements, we are only adding new relations. The new relations hold between body and body, between talk and talk and between the body of one and the talk of another. The many cognitive properties of systems of socially distributed cognition also enter at this level. There are six kinds of edges in the square-cut gem of interaction. The edges are loci of coordination and each is characterized by a distinct set of coordination types. In addition to edges, there are facets on the gem, which correspond to more complex systems of multimodal coordination. We are already familiar with the B/T/W facet for an individual. We have now added three facets: B/B/W, T/T/W, and a facet that would be called the “table” on a gem, B/B/T/T. A typical conversation between two people who are not handling artifacts might be thought to take place at the table. The T/T/W facet is the proper location of discourse analysis, although we have already begun our discussion of it above. The coordination processes that give rise to turn taking, sequential contingency of meaning, projection, and intersubjective reference and anaphora belong here. B/B/W comprises relations of coordination (entrainment of bodily motion as in synchronous applause), cooperation (passing on the street, e.g.) and collaboration (lifting something heavy together). Also the establishment and maintenance of shared attention, as well as the recipient design of gestures are forms of coordination on this facet. Talk1/Body2 can be seen in conventional greetings. Person 2 waves, or nods, person 1 says “Hey!” . Also in the microstructure of ongoing interaction in which a speaker shapes what is said based on the on-going non-verbal reactions of the interlocutor (Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000). The most interesting interactions take place in a system that involves the entire gem of interaction. Figure 3 shows two pilots working together in a complex setting: the flight deck of a Boeing 747-400. They are jointly planning an approach at their destination airport. A quick look here highlights some of kinds of coordination that arise when embodied interaction is situated in the social realm. Figure 3: Pilots jointly imagine the future The system of body/world coordination is rich. In addition to the pilot on the left locating and opening to the relevant page in the route manual, the two pilots are engaged in mutual recipient design in talk and in gesture. Each is shaping his own verbal and non-verbal behavior to suit the needs of the other. Relations of talk to the world demonstrate constraints in both directions. The spatial organization of a thing (airport description page) is being used to create sequential temporal structure in the activity by adopting a spatial “flow” of attention across the page. Reciprocally, talk constrains the engagement of the thing by making deictic reference to the items on the page. Talk and Body

Reasoning processes require stable representations of constraints. There are two principal ways to achieve stability in conceptual models. First, the conceptual models that anthropologists call cultural models achieve representational stability via a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. Second, the association of conceptual structure with material structure can stabilize conceptual representations. This is an old and pervasive cognitive strategy. Conceptual blending theory provides a useful framework for considering the joint contributions and mutual constraints of mental and material structure. Projecting material structure into a blended space can stabilize the conceptual blend. I call an input space from which material structure is projected into a blend a ‘material anchor’ for the blend. The term material anchor is meant to emphasize the stabilizing role of the material structure. In this article, I will present and discuss a number of examples of materially anchored blends, which depend to different degrees on material structure. Materially anchored blends vary on a number of complexly related dimensions, including the extent to which the blend relies on the presence of material structure in the perceptual field, the complexity of the material structure, and whether the material structure was designed to support the blend or is used opportunistically.

Cognitive ScienceVolume 27, Issue 2 p. 333-333 Free Access 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society First published: 11 February 2010 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2702_11AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume27, Issue2March 2003Pages 333-333 RelatedInformation

Abstract Culture is widely believed to play an important role in the international aviation system. Given the many factors, including the infrastructure of aviation, that affect aviation safety, the role of culture remains uncertain. It is accepted that culture must exert some influence on the patterns of behavior enacted by flight crews on the flight deck, but different views of culture produce different hypotheses about the role of culture in the organization of behavior. We review the history of ideas about culture and describe a recently developed concept of culture that is based in contemporary cognitive science. We then use this modern,theory of culture to evaluate recent attempts to understand the role of culture on the flight deck. Finally, we sketch a methodology for the study of culture on the flight deck. Keywords:Culture, aviation safety, flight deck operations, anthropology. Acknowledgements We are grateful to The Boeing Company,for funding this research and for creating an opportunity to discuss the issues and questions surrounding the role of culture in flight deck operations. We thank Randy Mumaw,for many,insightful comments,and interesting discussions. 3 Executive Summary

Distributed cognition is a framework for thinking about cognition which seeks to understand how the cognitive properties of aggregates emerge from the interactions of component parts. It can be applied to cognitive systems at many levels of complexity, from areas of an individual brain to communities of interacting persons. Distributed cognition is sometimes construed as a special kind of cognition that occurs when people are in interaction with one another or with material artifacts. This is only partly correct. Rather than being a kind of cognition, distributed cognition is a manner of thinking about cognition that permits one to examine the relationships between what is in the mind and the world the mind is in. When applied to groups of persons, distributed cognition provides a language for cognitive processes that are distributed across the members of a social group, between people and their material environments, and through time. It attempts to use an understanding of the social, cultural, and material context of cognitive practices to constrain models of cognitive processes within and among individual minds.