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Edwin Hutchins: An Analysis Of Cognitive Processes

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According to Edwin Hutchins in, “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction,” There are three ways that cognitive processes are distributed: through time, between a person and a culturally constructed environment, and between people in socially organized environments. This paper will focus on analyzing the cognitive system of an interaction between two people; one person asking for directions to a destination, and another person providing directions. To analyze a realistic cognitive system, I asked a handful of UCSD students for directions to the Biomedical Library; I will be analyzing one of these interactions. The interaction of asking for directions involves many embodied agents. These agents include: the direction seeker, …show more content…

With this in mind, the unit of analysis for this interaction was chosen because all agents involved directly influenced the emergent property. Of course, the unit of analysis may vary from interaction to interaction, depending on the resources present. A direction giver, for example, may give directions using the location of other objects in relation to the destination, or he may seek information from other agents, like students walking by. In this particular cognitive system that I was apart of, the unit of analysis included: myself, the direction giver, where the interaction took place, the destination, and the direction giver’s GPS. After analyzing this unit of analysis, I observed the emergent property of the system to be when I was given accurate directions to the destination. As the direction seeker, I would not have been able to find the destination without the information given by the direction giver, his phone, our current location, and the name of the destination. The emergent property can’t be accounted for by looking at the individual interacting parts in this cognitive system because the only information I had before the interaction was the name of the destination, the direction giver didn’t have a destination to go to prior to the interaction, and the phone didn’t have a user to input the name of the

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