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People thinking creatively will shift their bodies, wander around, move. Why? Here we investigate one explanation: Movement is a canny strategy for changing the information that is available visually, in ways that facilitate insight. We first analyzed video footage of mathematicians engrossed in creative thought. We found that sudden "aha" insights were reliably preceded by movements away far from the blackboard, as if mathematicians were stepping back to "see the big picture." To confirm the causal impact of changing proximity on creativity, we conducted an experiment that manipulated proximity to a whiteboard while participants worked on insight puzzles represented by diagrams. Participants had greater creative success when they could survey the entire whiteboard from a distance. Whether in real-world expert reasoning or a controlled experiment, movements away and toward visual representations facilitated insight. Wandering is sometimes a kind of epistemic action, facilitating the discovery of novel connections.

There are two foundational assumptions that underlie research in interactivity. First, that resources external to the human agent should support problem-solving and other cognitive activities and second, that human agents naturally engage in this form of offloading when they are allowed to. We aimed to test whether participants would naturally engage with external resources, without prompting, in four types of simple verbal problems and whether the level of engagement was affected by expertise or the experience of impasse. We found that very few people naturally engaged external resources apart from with mathematical problems where it had a benefit. There was no difference in expertise in problem-solving between those who did and those who did not use external props and nor was there a significant difference in the proportion of people using external resources as a function of experiencing impasse. These results suggest that researchers in interactivity need to focus on how and when interactivity is both engaged and provides a benefit.

In this paper, we identify two common assumptions underlying popular accounts of group agency. The first assumption is that paradigmatic cases of agency are to be identified with individual organisms, typically human beings. The second assumption is that cognition requires the manipulation of mental representations. Combining these two assumptions generates the status quo account of group agency, namely that a group's agency ontologically depends upon the mental representations of the individuals that constitute the group. We provide a taxonomy of views about group agency along two axes, each corresponding to the extent to which the view endorses (or rejects) one of these two common assumptions. We believe that none of the standard conceptions of group cognition and agency reject both of these two assumptions. After developing brief arguments against both assumptions, we provide a brief sketch of what an account of group agency that rejects both assumptions might look like.

Interlingual Respeaking (IR) is a new technique that enables real-time subtitling in a different language. This cognitively demanding technique involves collaboration between a language professional and automatic speech recognition software (ASR), creating a human-AI interaction (HAII) environment. Integrating technological tools with an individual's internal cognitive resources establishes an extended cognitive system. However, different types of errors are observed in terms of output accuracy. Our ESRC-funded research found that working memory (WM) (backward span) has a negative relationship with omissions, where content is dropped out (e.g., to save time). Nevertheless, additions, where the human adds content (e.g., to clarify meaning) and correctness, where form-related issues arise (such as grammar mistakes), had an inverse relationship with the N-back Task (the simultaneous maintenance, updating, and processing of WM). These findings suggest that the IR errors involve diverse types of WM resources.

Humans collaborate to improve productivity and collective outcomes, but people do not always exert maximal effort towards accomplishing collaborative goals. Instead, individuals often expend less effort in groups, a phenomenon known as social loafing that is traditionally viewed as detrimental to productivity. However, theories from distributed computer systems suggest that social loafing might be a rational response to the diminishing returns expected from division of labor when group size increases. Here, we examine how considerations of task efficiency affect the perceived acceptability of withholding effort during a collaborative task. We conducted experiments varying workload and group size across scenarios in which all group members except for one are actively contributing to a common goal. We then compare participant judgments to a model inspired by latency speed-up in distributed systems. We find that people are systematically influenced by task efficiency, in addition to social norms, when judging social loafing.

The digital environment has a significant impact on our everyday lives, but there is a lack of studies on how it affects cognitive processes like attention and working memory (WM). This study aims to compare attention and WM in digital and non-digital environments. In Experiment 1, we compared attention and working memory under paper and computer-based environment tasks. The findings showed that under non-digital condition attentional sustainability and visual working memory were better. In Experiment 2, we examined attentional shifting and sustainability at different levels of digital saturation (the presence of perceptual feedback on a website). Attentional sustainability was better in a saturated condition, but attentional shifting was not affected. Thus, the real environment is suggested to be superior due to lower saturation and higher motor-visual coherence. Digital saturation, along with the ACD idea, can guide attention. These results have applications for enhancing the user experience with interfaces.

Scientists, either working alone or in groups, require rich cognitive, social, cultural, and material environments to accomplish their epistemic aims. There is research in the cognitive sciences that examines intelligent behavior as a function of the environment ("environmental perspectives"), which can be used to examine how scientists integrate "cognitive-cultural" resources as they create environments for problem-solving. In this paper, I advance the position that an expanded framework of distributed cognition can provide conceptual, analytical, and methodological tools to investigate how scientists enhance natural cognitive capacities by creating specific kinds of environments to address their epistemic goals. In a case study of a pioneering neuroengineering lab seeking to understand learning in living networks of neurons, I examine how the researchers integrated conceptual, methodological, and material resources from engineering, neuroscience, and computational science to create different kinds of distributed problem-solving environments that enhanced their natural cognitive capacities, for instance, for reasoning, visualization, abstraction, imagination, and memory, to attain their epistemic aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhile existing research on solo travel often focuses on how solo travel affects tourists’ consumption-related (e.g. satisfaction, expenditure) or self-related consequences (e.g. self-growth), less is known about how solo travel exerts social and environmental consequences in destination-related domains. Through three experimental studies in incentive-compatible measures, this research proposes that at the longer post-trip stage, solo travelers, are more likely to engage in donation behavior toward the destination than those with companions. The present work demonstrates that this happens because solo travel creates enhanced destination memory associations, leading to more destination-related memories incorporated into their own self-concept, that is, enhanced psychological connectedness toward the destination. This stronger feeling of connectedness ultimately increases donation behavior. Moreover, this research identifies a boundary condition: when the companionship is highly meaningful, both tourists engaged in solo travel and travel with companions are equally likely to exhibit donation behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a semiotic externalist approach that takes cognition as semiosis, gives central importance to the notion of temporal distribution, describes the elements of distributed cognitive systems (DCSs) as signs, and identifies the DCS itself as a system that enacts a sign. This is a semiosis-centered, and thus a non-agent-centered account of DCSs. In order to develop and illustrate our argument, we describe an example of DCS – the Brazilian verbo-musical improvisational tradition of repente – considering it first as embodiment of the formal structure of a cognitive task, and then as embodiment of a semiotic process. The latter corresponds to a semiotization of the description of repente sessions as DCSs, that focuses on how the DCS can embody a meta semiotic process, semiosis that supervenes on, and determines, distinct types of smaller-scale semiotic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on reasoning about the location and time behind images. Given that pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit excellent image and text understanding capabilities, most existing methods leverage them to match visual cues with location and time-related descriptions. However, these methods cannot look beyond the actual content of an image, failing to produce satisfactory reasoning results, as such reasoning requires connecting visual details with rich external cues (e.g., relevant event contexts). To this end, we propose a novel reasoning method, QR-CLIP, that aims at enhancing the model's ability to reason about location and time through interaction with external explicit knowledge such as Wikipedia. Specifically, QR-CLIP consists of two modules: (1) The Quantity module abstracts the image into multiple distinct representations and uses them to search and gather external knowledge from different perspectives that are beneficial to model reasoning. (2) The Relevance module filters the visual features and the searched explicit knowledge and dynamically integrates them to form a comprehensive reasoning result. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of QR-CLIP. On the WikiTiLo dataset, QR-CLIP boosts the accuracy of location (country) and time reasoning by 7.03% and 2.22%, respectively, over previous SOTA methods. On the more challenging TARA dataset, it improves the accuracy for location and time reasoning by 3.05% and 2.45%, respectively. The source code is at https://github.com/Shi-Wm/QR-CLIP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although automated translation has been available for decades in myriad forms, the implication of the current exponential advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) for communication in general and translation in particular is more starkly affrontational than ever. Although Large Language Models, of which ChatGPT is exemplary, were not specifically designed for translation purposes, they are attested to have attained a sufficient degree of technical sophistication as to generate translations that match or surpass dedicated translation systems in the market like Google Translate and DeepL. This impacts the modus operandi of communication and the self-concept of language professionals including, of course, translators. This article asks how translation as a field of practice can best respond to this development. It critically reflects on the implications of AI for the conception of translation, arguing that an alternative framing around the idea of distribution allows us to rescale translation toward broader competencies and conceive of AI as a prosthesis of translators' minds. The article advocates a posthumanist perspective on translation with a view to expanding its spectrum of skills, modes, and media as well as transcending the traditional personae of translators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersection between cognition theories and urban planning, conceptualizing the city as a distributed socio-cognitive architecture. It traces the evolution of these theories through three waves—functionalism, social externalism, and radical enactivism —. Correspondingly, the article suggests implications for reorienting urban planning approaches, highlighting participatory design, collaborative placemaking, and the nurturing of place-based affordances. Drawing examples from existing planning literature, it demonstrates resonances with Extended Mind-informed orientations. The conclusion synthesizes these insights, proposing a potentially transformative framework by rethinking planning as more participatory, pluralistic, and cognitively integrative, challenging internalist and technocratic assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High levels of online activity have been linked with lower critical engagement and cognitive ability as well as lapses in attention and memory. This study examines whether individual differences in cognitive styles and abilities relating to the theoretical framework of distributed cognition predict social media behaviour. In this online study, 784 MTurk participants (55% male) completed measures of social media use, online friendships, need for cognition, dissociative tendencies, and vocabulary. They also answered questions about online news-related information sharing (with and without reading the article). Multiple regression and relative weights analysis show that higher dissociative tendencies and lower verbal ability predict social media use, online friendships and information sharing behaviour. Dissociation was the most important predictor, particularly for sharing news-related information without first reading it, with moderate to large effects. Perceptions of information accuracy and source trustworthiness were identified as key factors in driving information sharing behaviour. Our research has important implications for today's technological society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract High levels of online activity have been linked with lower critical engagement and cognitive ability as well as lapses in attention and memory. This study examines whether individual differences in cognitive styles and abilities relating to the theoretical framework of distributed cognition predict social media behaviour. In this online study, 784 MTurk participants (55% male) completed measures of social media use, online friendships, need for cognition, dissociative tendencies, and vocabulary. They also answered questions about online news-related information sharing (with and without reading the article). Multiple regression and relative weights analysis show that higher dissociative tendencies and lower verbal ability predict social media use, online friendships and information sharing behaviour. Dissociation was the most important predictor, particularly for sharing news-related information without first reading it, with moderate to large effects. Perceptions of information accuracy and source trustworthiness were identified as key factors in driving information sharing behaviour. Our research has important implications for today’s technological society.

Some commentators have recently argued that scientific psychology is overly reliant on artificial laboratory-based activities and that it undervalues field-based investigations. However, it remains unclear how a field-based programme of psychological research might be organized in a scalable way. We examine and compare two existing field-based approaches: Roger Barker's behaviour settings programme and Edwin Hutchins's distributed cognition programme. Both programmes prioritize observational work, and both reject the individual as the unit of analysis in favour of a community-scale unit. However, whereas the behaviour settings programme is concerned with structural properties of community life, distributed cognition is concerned more narrowly with the functional analysis of expert team performance. We discuss how these programmes can inform a future community-scale approach to studying psychology in the wild. We conclude that the two programmes are proof of concept of the possibility of a scientific psychology that rejects methodological individualism. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating emotionally truthful screen performances is often thought the performance elixir for screen actors and directors, but how this process is approached is subject to significant, and often idiosyncratic, variation from both actors and directors alike. During my own experience as a professional director working in filmed drama, I recognised the struggle rationalising a response to each performed take. In this article, I attempt to identify a conceptual frame implicit in many approaches to directing screen acting but not explicitly referenced or conceptualised as a directorial skill or intrinsic directorial process. This analysis aims to identify enacted emotionality as a missing concept from the directing screen acting literature. This analysis rooted in the theories of distributed cognition, a constructed theory of emotion, and affect theory attempts to explain how the process of directing screen acting can be more explicitly defined as characterising the range of cognitive activities involved in, and experienced by, screen directors and actors while making Film/TV drama. This inter-disciplinary approach offers a conceptual contribution towards the application of an enacted emotionality as a missing concept in the directing screen acting literature that can benefit future media education and practice for screen directors, actors, and media scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high predictive accuracy of contemporary machine learning-based AI systems has led some scholars to argue that, in certain cases, we should grant them epistemic expertise and authority over humans. This approach suggests that humans would have the epistemic obligation of relying on the predictions of a highly accurate AI system. Contrary to this view, in this work we claim that it is not possible to endow AI systems with a genuine account of epistemic expertise. In fact, relying on accounts of expertise and authority from virtue epistemology, we show that epistemic expertise requires a relation with understanding that AI systems do not satisfy and intellectual abilities that these systems do not manifest. Further, following the Distribution Cognition theory and adapting an account by Croce on the virtues of collective epistemic agents to the case of human-AI interactions we show that, if an AI system is successfully appropriated by a human agent, a hybrid epistemic agent emerges, which can become both an epistemic expert and an authority. Consequently, we claim that the aforementioned hybrid agent is the appropriate object of a discourse around trust in AI and the epistemic obligations that stem from its epistemic superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the 'dogma of harmony' in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using case study methodology, this article analyzes the collaborative writing of three adolescent girls, one Latina and two Black, composing a group poem in an after-school spoken word poetry team. Drawing from literature on distributed cognition and embodiment, we found that participants utilized a system of writing techniques "on the page," as well as a variety of embodied and social practices "off the page" in their team meetings to collaboratively compose this poem. We argue that focusing on the intersection of distributed cognition and embodiment in collaborative writing allows writing researchers to more fully attend to the collaborative sociality of all writing and allows teachers to support youth writers in recognizing and gaining collaborative writing skills for professional and creative writing contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intention offloading refers to the use of external reminders to help remember delayed intentions (e.g., setting an alert to help you remember when you need to take your medication). Research has found that metacognitive processes influence offloading such that individual differences in confidence predict individual differences in offloading regardless of objective cognitive ability. The current study investigated the cross-domain organization of this relationship. Participants performed two perceptual discrimination tasks where objective accuracy was equalized using a staircase procedure. In a memory task, two measures of intention offloading were collected, (1) the overall likelihood of setting reminders, and (2) the bias in reminder-setting compared to the optimal strategy. It was found that perceptual confidence was associated with the first measure but not the second. It is shown that this is because individual differences in perceptual confidence capture meaningful differences in objective ability despite the staircase procedure. These findings indicate that intention offloading is influenced by both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive signals. They also show that even when task performance is equalized via staircasing, individual differences in confidence cannot be considered a pure measure of metacognitive bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Human performers often recruit environment-based assistance to acquire or process information, such as relying on a smartphone app, a search engine, or a conversational agent. To make informed choices between several of such extended cognitive strategies, performers need to monitor the performance of these options. Objective: In the present study, we investigated whether participants monitor an extended cognitive strategy's performance—here, speed—more closely during initial as compared to later encounters. Methods: In three experiments, 737 participants were asked to first observe speed differences between two competing cognitive strategies—here, two competing algorithms that can obtain answers to trivia questions—and eventually choose between both strategies based on the observations. Results: Participants were sensitive to subtle speed differences and selected strategies accordingly. Most remarkably, even when participants performed identically with both strategies across all encounters, the strategy with superior speed in the initial encounters was preferred. Worded differently, participants exhibited a technology-use primacy effect. Contrarily, evidence for a recency effect was weak at best. Conclusion: These results suggest that great care is required when performers are first acquainted with novel ways to acquire or process information. Superior initial performance has the potential to desensitize the performer for inferior later performance and thus prohibit optimal choice. Application: Awareness of primacy enables users and designers of extended cognitive strategies to actively remediate suboptimal behavior originating in early monitoring episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersection between cognition theories and urban planning, conceptualizing the city as a distributed socio-cognitive architecture. It traces the evolution of these theories through three waves—functionalism, social externalism, and radical enactivism —. Correspondingly, the article suggests implications for reorienting urban planning approaches, highlighting participatory design, collaborative placemaking, and the nurturing of place-based affordances. Drawing examples from existing planning literature, it demonstrates resonances with Extended Mind-informed orientations. The conclusion synthesizes these insights, proposing a potentially transformative framework by rethinking planning as more participatory, pluralistic, and cognitively integrative, challenging internalist and technocratic assumptions.

ObjectivesIn acute care settings, interactions between providers and tools drive clinical decision-making. Most studies of decision-making focus on individual cognition and fail to capture critical collaborations. Distributed Cognition (DCog) theory provides a framework for examining the dispersal of tasks among agents and artifacts, enhancing the investigation of decision-making and error.ContentThis scoping review maps the evidence collected in empiric studies applying DCog to clinical decision-making in acute care settings and identifies gaps in the existing literature.Summary and outlookThirty-seven articles were included. The majority (n=30) used qualitative methods (observations, interviews, artifact analysis) to examine the work of physicians (n=28), nurses (n=27), residents (n=16), and advanced practice providers (n=12) in intensive care units (n=18), operating rooms (n=7), inpatient units (n=7) and emergency departments (n=5). Information flow (n=30) and task coordination (n=30) were the most frequently investigated elements of DCog. Provider-artifact (n=35) and provider-provider (n=30) interactions were most explored. Electronic (n=18) and paper (n=15) medical records were frequently described artifacts. Seven prominent themes were identified. DCog is an underutilized framework for examining how information is obtained, represented, and transmitted through complex clinical systems. DCog offers mechanisms for exploring how technologies, like EMRs, and workspaces can help or hinder clinical decision-making.

Moral injury describes the set of psychological symptoms resulting from traumatic experiences that violate one’s moral presuppositions. Such disruption occurs when an individual encounters information from the environment that cannot be reconciled with the fundamental assumptions underlying their predictive models of the world. Examination of predictive models has been rapidly developing within cognitive science, with the predictive processing framework emerging as a central paradigm. Predictive processing entails estimations of sensory uncertainty scaffolded by previous predictions and modified by attention. This model describes cognition as seeking to minimize sensory prediction error using dynamic interactions between top-down and bottom-up processes. Therefore, the predictive processing framework may be fruitfully used to examine psychological changes related to moral injury. Towards this end, we will consider moral injury as a form of belief updating, dysregulation in precision estimates of predictive models, and a breakdown in what Ramstead et al. (2016) call ‘regimes of shared attention.

One of the most ancient and universal forms of cognitive offloading is the outsourcing of cognitive operations onto other humans. We explored mechanisms underlying this ability by designing a novel computerised memory task where participants memorised target locations and recalled them after a brief delay. Next, they watched two virtual people compete in another memory game, where one demonstrated a reliable memory, and the other demonstrated an unreliable memory. Finally, participants completed the initial memory task again, with either the reliable-memory or unreliable-memory person being available to help with recall on each trial. Through observation and without direct instruction, participants acquired beliefs about the virtual people’s cognitive proficiencies and could readily draw upon these beliefs to inform offloading decisions. Participants were more likely to seek help from the reliable-memory person, and this tendency interacted with factors known to drive cognitive offloading more generally, like task difficulty and unaided cognitive ability.

Humans are social animals. Human cognition evolved in a social context. Human cognition develops in a social context. Thus, both the internal mechanisms of cognition and the information we use are social. In this workshop, we aim to extend the boundaries of cognitive sciences beyond individual minds. Following the lead of Dingemanse et al. (2023), we put interaction in focus as a complementary starting point for the study of human cognition.

Science teaching is a complex socio-cognitive practice, where teachers simultaneously collaborate with and influence student minds. This process is distributed across textbooks, explanations, blackboard activities, student questions, student performance, etc.; and enactive, as teachers act out scientific mechanisms using descriptions, gestures, teaching props, models etc. This complex process of Teacher Cognition (TC) is not well understood, as existing studies are disparate, and based on disjointed approaches. The lack of a TC theory limits the design of systematic education policies - currently based on intuitions about teacher cognition - leading to policy guidelines that teachers find difficult to implement. Recent developments in embodied/enactive cognition theory – particularly the enactive simulation model of language and the enactive simulation theory of other minds – provide useful ways to develop models of TC, especially related to science teaching. Here we extend and develop a finer-grained version of a recent enactive model of TC, using classroom data.

Creative people move in ways that seem aimless. Artists and mathematicians wander about, sometimes standing next to their easel or blackboard, other times standing across the room. Why do creatives expend energy on aimless movement? We propose that such movements facilitate insight by changing the information that is visually available. We tested this mechanism in two online studies. Participants attempted to solve an insight puzzle. We manipulated whether participants could only see a diagram representing the puzzle, as though they were standing close to it, or could also see a diagram from an earlier puzzle, as though they had stepped back. Visual access to the second diagram acted as a visual hint, increasing the rate of insight by suggesting an analogous solution. We argue that this mechanism explains the creative benefits of seemingly aimless movement. We discuss implications for understanding creativity as arising from interactions among brain, body, and environment.

A prominent question in social epistemology concerns the epistemic profile of groups. While inflationists and deflationists agree that groups are fit to constitute knowers, they disagree about whether group knowledge is reducible to knowledge of their individual members. This paper develops and defends a weak inflationist view according to which some, but not all, group knowledge is over and above any knowledge of their members. This view sits between the deflationist view that all group knowledge is reducible to individual knowledge, and the strong inflationist view that some such knowledge even fails to supervene on features of individuals. Thus, some group knowledge is irreducible, but all such knowledge is anchored in, and so doesn't float freely from, individual features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is tension about teachers' professional use of social media platforms, such as Pinterest, to access instructional resources for teaching science. Teachers' frequent use of Pinterest signals their perceived value despite concerns about the quality of the resources found there. These resources can constitute a part of teachers' network of resources, contributing in some ways and constraining in others. This study seeks to contribute to the discussion about online resources through an in-depth content analysis of 438 websites on Pinterest related to two elementary science topics: adaptation and force. Findings indicate the potential of Pinterest to expand the number and variety of examples available to teachers for both topics. However, findings also demonstrate ways resources for both topics could constrain teachers' knowledge systems: they may narrow teachers' vision of quality science instruction to engaging in activities and the resources for both topics may constrain teachers' knowledge of the science subject matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a spirit of collegial support, this paper argues that Beckett and Hager's theoretical justification and empirical exemplifications do not do full justice to the complexity of group or team learning. We firstly reaffirm our support for the theoretical argument Becket and Hager make, though expressing some reservations about Complexity Theory, to explain the taken-for-granted assumptions that learning by an individual is the paradigm case of learning and that context plays a minimal role in this process. Drawing on our joint and separate work, we demonstrate that Becket and Hager's argument is less radical than it may initially seem because it is predicated on: (i) cognitive-bounded rather than "distributed" or "extended" conception of mind; (ii) material rather than a "immaterial" conception of activity; and (iii) co-present rather than a "fractional" or "connective" conception of ontology. Despite making this critique, we conclude by making the case that we are adding further substance to Becket and Hager's overarching argument and, in doing so, encouraging them to be more radical about how they conceptualise the complexity of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light on two different perspectives on the boundaries of the cognitive system and the consequences of their adoption for Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS). Both are represented by different approaches within the cognitive scientific cluster of approaches referred to as situated or 4EA (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective) cognition. The first, the person-centred perspective, takes individuals as a starting point and describes their interactions with their social and material surroundings. The second, the distributed, extended perspective, takes the joint activity of different situated actors and material artefacts as its starting point and depicts this socio-cognitive unit as the object of analysis. With this article, we do not seek to advocate the use of one over the other. Rather, we attempt to offer a coherent interpretation of how the cognitive process of translation can be studied and interpreted as a situated activity either from the perspective of individual actors or from a larger, distributed, and extended angle that considers people and the relevant social and material environment as a system. Specifically, we discuss what is to be gained if translation is studied from a distributed cognitive perspective. To this end, we illustrate key aspects of the discussion using empirical examples from current field research in which both an individual and a distributed perspective are applied to analyse interaction in a translation workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High cholesterol levels significantly contribute to the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ACVD), with a notable portion of ischemic heart disease cases linked to elevated cholesterol levels. Effective graphical displays of lipid panel tests and other cardiac risk factors are crucial for quick and accurate data interpretation, enabling early intervention for individuals with hyperlipidemia. Applying design theories such as Gestalt and distributed cognitive theories is essential for creating user-centered graphical data displays in the context of cardiovascular (CV) risk factors. The proposed dashboard informed by these theories is expected to help healthcare providers better address cardiovascular disease (CVD), enhancing diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Moreover, this approach may help alleviate clinical provider burnout, improve patient outcomes, and reduce provider stress, thus contributing to safer and more effective healthcare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aimed at advancing the reform of the Paid Use of Residential Land, this study investigates the willingness to pay among farmers and its underlying factors. Based on a Logistic Regression analysis of a micro-survey of 450 pieces of data from the Sichuan Province in 2023, we evaluated the effects of three factors, namely individual, regional and cultural forces. Further, Random Forest analysis and SHAP value interpretation refined our insights into these effects. Firstly, the research reveals a significant willingness to pay, with 83.6% of sample farmers being ready to participate in the reform, and 53.1% of them preferring online payment (the funds are mostly expected to be used for village infrastructure improvements). Secondly, the study implies that Individual Force is the most impactful factor, followed by regional and cultural forces. Thirdly, the three factors show different effects on farmers' willingness to pay from different income groups, i.e., villagers with poorer infrastructure and lower clarity of homestead policy systems tend to be against the reform, whereas farmers with strong urban identity and collective pride support it. Based on these findings, efforts should be made to increase the publicity of Paid Use of Residential Land. Moreover, we should clarify the reform policies, accelerate the development of the online payment platform, use the funds for village infrastructure improvements, and advocate for care-based fee measures for disadvantaged groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildlife field guide books present salient features of species, from colour and form to behaviour, and give their readers a vocabulary to express what these features look like. Such structures for observation, or observational grids, allow users to identify wildlife species through what Law and Lynch have called 'the difference that makes the difference'. In this article, we show how these grids, and the characteristics that distinguish species, change over time in response to wider concerns in the community that use and make the field guides. We use the development of Dutch field guides for dragonflies to show how the ethics of observing wildlife, the recreational value of dragonfly observation, the affordances of observational tools, and biodiversity monitoring and conservation goals all have repercussions for how dragonflies are to be identified. Ultimately, this affects not only how dragonflies are to be observed and identified, but also what is taken to be 'out there'. The article is based on a transdisciplinary cooperation between a dragonfly enthusiast with emic knowledge and access, and an STS researcher. We hope the articulation of our approach might inspire analyses of other observational practices and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Rice production is the core component of the food security strategy in China, but it is also a major source of methane and nitrous oxide. Promoting low-carbon rice farming (LCRF) to increase the carbon sink, decrease carbon emissions, and achieve low-carbon, high-yield production is an inevitable "win-win" choice for achieving "double carbon" targets and guaranteeing national food security. This study contributes to the advancement of research on farmers' adoption decisions and fills gaps in LCRF's technical research on farmers' decision-making behavior. The results also provide a basis for formulating policies to encourage LCRF and protect cultivated land. Methods: This study conducted field research on 2,173 farming households in Jiangxi Province, a traditional agricultural province in China, and examined the effects of personal forces, local forces, and cultural forces on LCRF adoption behavior by introducing the distributed cognition theoretical framework based on a status quo analysis and employing the multivariate ordinal logistic model. Results and discussion: The results of the study showed that: 1) the overall acceptance of LCRF behavior is currently not very high. In the 2173 questionnaires, the mean number of LCRF behavior items accepted by farmers was 3.10 items; 153 farmers did not adopt any LCRF behavior, and only 77 farmers adopted all LCRF behaviors. Most farmers (n = 535) adopted three LCRF behaviors. 2) In distributed cognition affecting LCRF behavior, acceptance was primarily affected by cultural forces, followed by local forces, while the effects of personal forces were limited. Therefore, it is recommended that training and promotion should be increased, policy subsidies should be increased, the land market should be improved, and LCRF demonstrations should be carried out to increase the acceptance of LCRF behavior among rice farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the gender dimensions of space in response to Witold Wachowski's Distributed Cognition. From Heuristics to Mechanisms [Poznanie rozproszone. Od heurystyk do mechanizmów]. Wachowski's work belongs to the so-called "turn to space," according to which we treat the environment as an integral part of culture, and culture as a cognitive process. By focusing on relevant examples, it illustrates how space, broadly understood, can shape and perpetuate gender stereotypes. It aims to inspire further, in-depth research on the relationship between gender and space (and, more broadly, on cognition and cognitive processes) in the framework of distributed cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of psychopathology in the context of the idea of distributed cognition. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach to the analysis of cognitive systems and the relationships among their underlying components. In the first part of this paper, I describe the key assumptions of distributed cognition and consider its utility in the fields of philosophy of psychiatry and psychology. Having done so, I attempt to depict addiction as a state that cannot be described solely from an individualistic point of view, but rather as a distributed phenomenon. This standpoint corresponds to Hanna Pickard's account and the concept of affordances, which has increasingly been used in the context of psychopathology in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the role of distributed mechanisms in cognitive processes. It discusses the results of research in economics, geography and organization theory on the spatial concentration of actors in innovative industries. Although geographic economics and other disciplines have demonstrated a relationship between geographic concentration and inventiveness and innovation, they have not offered explanation in terms of mechanisms. Employing the concept of distributed mechanisms, this article proposes a reinterpretation of concepts such as buzz and the knowledge spillover effect that geography and economics refer to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of the category of affordances in sociological concepts addressing the relationship between social structure and individual agency. It focuses on two sociological concepts that attempt to capture this relationship in a coherent theoretical approach and without falling into social determinism and excessive individualism. These are critical realism and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus. This paper argues that the category of affordances is a useful tool for describing the relationship between the subject and the environment, allowing one to focus on material factors in the study of social structures, while recognizing the active role of the subject in their co-creation. Particularly promising here is the integration of affordances into the concept of distributed cognition, used in sociology to study sociotechnical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even if the integration of distributed cognition with mechanistic conceptions of explanation can be seen as an interesting move and, if successful, leading to a non-trivial extension of cognitive science research, from the perspective of a distributed cognition theorist, the move should be seen as risky. In the paper, arguing against the proposal of Witold Wachowski (2022), I will try to outline the risks that the aforementioned integration entails and propose an alternative solution, which consists in combining distributed cognition with network theory. This theory (in my opinion) allows for a more fruitful study of patterns of distributed cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to highlight and complement certain themes of the book Distributed Cognition. From Heuristics to Mechanisms [Poznanie rozproszone. Od heurystyk do mechanizmów] (2022). This monograph considers the current situation facing cognitive science from the perspective of the concept of distributed cognition and related research. The book's focus is on the structure of this concept and its place in research paradigms. In light of the current state of cognitive science, here the emphasis is on presenting the still underestimated potential of distributed cognition as a universal understanding of cognition, the actual research implications of this perspective, its relationship with mechanisms and its integrative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to test the fruitfulness of bringing together two research programmes, Course of Action (PRCA) and Distributed Cognition (PRCD), for the study of human-animal interactions. This development of the PRCA towards an "augmented PRCA" aims to raise new research questions, linked to the integration of animal activities and human-animal interactions in the field of practice analysis. This article makes an empirical contribution to the development of this program by analyzing human-horse communication, in particular the interactions between Cadre Noir écuyers and sauteur horses. To study interspecies interactions, we use several theoretical concepts from these two research programs: cultural practice, mutual appropriationaction, and another concept already explored in previous work, namely sensorimotor empathy. We argue that the cultural practice of airs above the ground, shared by the écuyer and the sauteur, is both a condition and a result of sensorimotor empathy, which develops through a process of mutual appropriation-action. This study confirms the relevance of an "augmented" PRCA to account for animal activities and interspecies interactions, and contributes to a better understanding of the latter. It opens up prospects for new empirical studies to be carried out that highlight the development of mutual sensorimotor empathy within other shared cultural practices between humans and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than ask if expertise is under threat, this paper uses case studies to show how expertise is enabled. Its appearance can be traced to how the already known evokes sensibility, judging, thinking and languaging. As defined below, it draws on epistemic cycles. Using Secchi and Cowley's (2021) 3M model, this posits a second cut between the micro and the macro. In the mesosphere, people create temporary domains or what William James (1991) calls 'little worlds'. Within these corpora popularia, the new is made possible – expertise sets off unimagined outcomes. Thus, many concerns cannot be solved by scientific correlates of a natural ontological attitude: indeed, the truism clarifies many social challenges. We lack social institutions that dedicate expertise to goals like ecosocial justice and life-sustaining relations. Once the necessary expertise is traced to epistemic cycles, we can demand of institutions that they create bodies that seek to bring a rich future to evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]