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External Cognition Presentation

• Notes on Cognition in the Wild
• Notes on The Design of Everyday Things

SITUATE

Where it pops up

• Problem solving (Diagrams)
  • ->Computational offloading
• Navigation
  • ->Reminders

What it is

• IRs and ERs

Intelligence -> ER -> Intelligence (->IR<-) -> Behavior

What is the altnernative?

Symbols -> Intelligence(->IR<-) -> Behavior

Does this work for

• Diagrams?
• Environment??
• People???

External representations aren't necessarily constructed.

What about

• Internal and External States?

Does this lose explanatory power?

"Knowledge in the world"

-->What does this mean?

How it works

What Rogers and Scaife think we need to figure out:

• The properties of the graphical representation (ER)
• The way those properties are represented internally (IR)
• Computational processes that mediate between the two (Intelligence)

Larkin and Simon (1987)

• Data structures that represent the problem (ER)
• Productions that contain knowledge of the domain (IR)
• Attention manager (Intelligence)

Big question: what is being done by the Internal Representation and the External Representation, respectively?

• Are we just "dumping" our IR to the world? (External Memory)
  • What if we "dump" the sentence?
• Process (IR+Intelligence) vs. Product (ER)

Producing the ER does most of the work. Once we have a diagram, the eye and the diagram together produce the solution with little effort.

• perceptual inference is easier than symbolic inference

Question: Is this just because of practice?

Goal: Computational Offloading

Tactic: Re-representation

• Physical constraints
• Implicit relationships
  • Only work as far as they can. Plotting phone numbers won't tell you anything.
• Active parsing
  • Animation, temporal parsing

Question: Can we look at all behavior in terms of external cognition? How about opening a door?

Tactic: Reminding

• Signal/Message

Question: Does this breakdown work for navigation?

Does it work?

• Interaction between Goal, Format, Knowledge (
  • Perceptual inference requires having the intelligence to parse the percepts properly

How it is used

• Educational materials
• Elsewhere?

 

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