Lecture 3

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Distributed Cognition: Extending the Power of the Unaided, Individual Human Mind

Gerhard Fischer, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick

Fall Semester 2010

gerhard@colorado.edu; haleden@colorado.edu; holger.dick@gmail.com;  

September 1, 2010

Basic Message

• thinking, knowing, working, collaborating and learning will further transcend the unaided individual human mind in the 21st century

• innovative media and technologies (“socio-technical environments, human-centered environments”) are of critical importance supporting new levels of distributed cognition

Beyond the Unaided, Individual Human Mind

Distributed Cognition

• claim: human cognition has been seen as existing solely “inside” a person’s head, and studies on cognition have often disregarded the physical and social surroundings in which cognition takes place

• distribution among people:

• all of us are knowledgable in some domains and not in others (“symmetry of ignorance”)
• division of labor + specialization
• collaborative learning and working (CSCL and CSCW)

• distribution between humans minds and artifacts

• changing tasks and intelligence augmentation
• external representations (visualizations, simulations, ….)

• the two distributions can and should be integrated ? human-centered computing

Two Perspectives on Distributed Cognition

• personal point of view: distributed cognition changes the nature of the tasks which human beings have to do creating new divisions of labor

• source: Norman, D. A. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA.
• examples:
• check-out clerk in a supermarket
• pilot flying a modern airplane
• velcro
• human-centered public transportation systems

• system point of view: the “person + artifact” is smarter than either alone

• source: Engelbart, D. C. (1995) "Toward Augmenting the Human Intellect and Boosting Our Collective IQ," Communications of the ACM, 38(8), pp. 30-33.
• Einstein: “My pencil is cleverer than I”
• examples: socio-technical environments for
• cockpit (pilot + computers + air traffic controllers) of an airplane
• socio-technical environments for people with cognitive abilities

Technologies Changing Tasks

From the Neighborhood Store to the Smart Store of the Future

• media: head ? pencil and paper ? adding machines ? UPC, scanners and databases, RFID tags

• sales clerks: adding prices

• in their heads
• using pencil and paper
• using adding machines
• using scanners
• no need for their services anymore

• money: computing the change in the head ? by the machine ? processing credit cards

• customer:

• checking out their own groceries (“do I want to do this?”)
• walking by a RFID reader

• overall performance of the system: speed, reliability, visibility, cost

Why Distributed Cognition?
A few Claims based on the work of Jerome Bruner

• human mental activity is neither solo nor conducted unassisted, even when it goes “inside the head”

• “how the mind works” is dependent on the tools at its disposal

? “how the hand works” cannot be fully appreciated unless one takes into account whether it is equipped with a screwdriver, a pair of scissors

• externalizations, oeuvres, works, works-in-progress

• produce a record of our efforts, one that is “outside us” rather than simply in memory
• produce situations talking back to us ? visualizations, critiquing
• make our thoughts and intentions more accessible to reflective efforts
• works-in-progress produce and sustain creativity with shared and negotiable ways of thinking in a group

Why Distributed Cognition?
A few Claims based on the work of Merlin Donald

• brain-culture symbiosis: the human brain cannot realize its potential unless it is immersed in a distribution network

• material culture:

• externalizes memory and greatly amplifies the permanence and power of distributed cognition
• new media gradually freed the symbolization process from the limitations of biological memory
• the material culture sometimes overwhelms us with its richness

• higher intelligence:

• a product of marrying the raw intellectual power of the human brain to an appropriate technology
• think previously unthinkable thoughts

Technologies for Improving Cognitive Function

• technologies for improving cognitive function

• are the fundamental achievement of humankind to create the world in which we live today
• technologies in this context are very broadly defined including “mind tools” for performing cognitive work (e.g.: musical notation, Arabic instead of Roman numerals,.........)

• all human beings have cognitive limitations (limits of short-term memory ? reading and writing)

• working with people with cognitive disabilities provides unique challenges and unique opportunities to further advance our understanding of distributed intelligence
• see CLever project:
• video shown on August 23
• class meeting on Wed, Sept 8

Questions about Cognitive Artifacts

• what parts of tasks and the responsibility have to be exercised by human beings because they are really better reserved for an skilled or experienced human mind?

• which ones should be taken over by (= automate) or aided by (= informate) the computational systems?

• what kind of information processing help is necessary and how do we organize things so that the people can interact effectively with the computational system? (? fundamental challenges for human-centered computation)

Questions

How important is it to know the answers in your head?

• which language is spoken in Brazil?

• are Euros the currency in Sweden?

• how do cows sleep?

• is the sense of balance age-dependent?

• what is a slide rule? what is it used for? how does it work?

• lowest temperature on earth?

• some famous building from Frank Gehry?

What is the Difference from a Distributed Cognition Perspective?

between

• a Printed Map

• Google Maps used on a PC / Laptop

• a Navigation System in a car

Basic Skills in the 21^st Century?

• If most job-relevant knowledge must be learned on demand what is the role for basic education?

• consider the role of a traditional high school mathematics education

• 
  
  • there is a general perception that American children are poorly prepared in mathematics and that this is part of the reason for our lack of international competitiveness
  • the kind of mathematics that American schools fail at teaching (and which other countries excel at) has increasingly little relationship to work performance
  • almost all of the mathematics that students learn in traditional high school mathematics is job-irrelevant (e.g., doing proofs in geometry) or now automated (e.g., algebraic symbol manipulation).
  • most people's on-the-job contact with mathematics (if they have any) will be in using tables and software packages based on mathematics

• perhaps the function of a high-school mathematics education is to train students to intelligently use these mathematical artifacts?

• perhaps we need only teach traditional mathematics to a small minority of the population who will maintain these systems?

Possible Roles for Humans and Computers in
Distributed Cognition

source: Norman, D. A. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart

black: human-centered view

blue: computer-centered view

Visualization = In Search for Powerful External Representation

source: Simon, H. A. (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial, third ed.,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• informational efficiency: two representations are informationally equivalent if all of the information in the one is also inferable from the other, and vice versa. Each could be constructed from the information in the other.

• computational efficiency: two representations are computationally equivalent if they are informationally equivalent and, in addition, any inference that can be drawn easily and quickly from the information given explicitly in the one can also be drawn easily and quickly from the information given explicitly in the other, and vice versa

• informational equivalence versus computational equivalence of representations ? “even if two representations contain exactly the same information, it may be far cheaper, computationally, to make some of this information explicit using one representation than using the other”

The Importance of Representations

• critical importance of representations:

“Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent”

• number scrabble (“The Game of 15”)

1. two person game
2. numbers from 1 to 9
3. players alternate and take one of the numbers
4. the player who can add exactly three numbers in her/his possession to equal 15 will win

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

Tic-Tac-Toe

Number Scrabble and Tic-Tac-Toe: The “Same Game”
—
visualization makes a BIG difference (for human; for computer programs, Number Scrabble “is easier”)

Mutilated Matrix

Mutilated Chessboard

The Matchmaker Story

Many years ago, in a small but very proper village in the Midwest, there were 32 bachelors and 32 unmarried women. Through tireless efforts, the village matchmaker succeeded in arranging 32 highly satisfactory marriages. The village was proud and happy. Then one drunken Saturday night, two bachelors, in a test of strength, stabbed each other with knives.

Question: Can the matchmaker, through some quick arrangements, come up with 31 satisfactory marriages among the 62 survivors?

Constraints: good catholic environment — no same-sex marriages are allowed!

The Scarce Resource: Human Attention, not Information

• problem: external information environments can overwhelm humans with their richness (? information overload)

• claim: a design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce factor is attention ? for example: a “good” representation captures the essential elements of an event, deliberately leaving out the rest

• Herbert Simon: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Beyond Anywhere, Anytime, Anyone
?
The ‘Right’ Information at the ‘Right’ Time, in the ‘Right Place’, in the ‘Right Way’, to the ‘Right’ Person

• ‘right’ information: relevant to the task at hand ? task modeling

• ‘right’ time: intrusiveness (pull versus push), interruptions

• ‘right’ place: location-aware cell phone (noisy environment versus movie theatre), smart tour guides

• ‘right’ way: multimodal presentation (textual, visual, auditory, tactile)

• ‘right’ person: taking background knowledge and interests of specific users into account ? user modeling, “who do I ask and who do I tell”

Quality Dimensions of External Representations
Supporting Distributed Cognition

• long lasting (not ephemeral)

• easily produced, modified, and reproduced

• communicable over distance

• computational capabilities (e.g., multi-model, dependent on user, task, and context)

• exploiting the strength of the human system ? sometimes visualization make a big difference (Number Scrabble and Tic-Tac Toe) and sometimes they do not

Two Examples of Socio-Technical Environments Supporting Distributed Cognition

• CLever: Cognitive Levers — Helping People Help Themselves
  • 
    
    • video shown on August 23
    • class meeting on Wed, Sept 8

• EDC: Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory
  • 
    
    • class meeting on Monday, Sept 18

Impact of New Technologies and New Media

• claim: all important technologies are “Faustian bargains”: they give and take away ? technological change always produces winners and loosers

• while the growth of technology is certain, the inevitability of any particular future is not ? therefore: we can envision a number of different futures that might be

• danger of a decrease in the power of the aided, collective human mind

• “Amusing Ourselves to Death” with irrelevant information (Postman)
• continuous partial attention and the attention economy (“always on”: constantly being accessible makes someone inaccessible)
• a live black-berry, a switched-on mobile phone or a laptop in front of someone is an admission that her/his commitment to the current activity is limited

Assessment and Acceptance

• while reading and writing is

• readily accepted to “improve our minds” (i.e. it is considered a “tool for living”),
• the acceptance of other tools (such as spelling correctors, hand-held calculators, …) is much more controversial (they are considered by many exclusively as “tools for learning”)

• we do want to create “independence of tools” where this is possible

• e.g., we want to be independent of spelling correctors and hand-held calculators as much as possible based on a reasonable effort
• but for a person with strong dyslexia a spelling corrector (just as eyeglasses for a person with poor eyesight) is a tool for living and often a prerequisite to allow people in engage in problem solving, working, and learning (which would be impossible without the tool)

Gains and Losses of New Media

Conclusions

• the basic message: thinking, knowing, working, collaborating and learning will further transcend the unaided  individual human mind in the 21st century ? this is not a luxury, but a necessity

• innovative media and technologies (“socio-technical environments, human-centered environments”) are of critical importance supporting new levels of distributed cognition