Activity: Cognitive Diary

Due in class 1/22

The goal of this project is two-fold. First, you will learn to think about the nature of cognitive tasks in everyday life and how they can be analyzed. Be sure to make use of the ideas from the main readings.

Directions:

  1. Keep a “cognitive diary” for an entire day. Whenever you engage in some kind of cognitive task – i.e., something that requires you to think, plan, remember, or problem-solve – try to notice it and make a record of it (jot it down, dictate to tape recorder, etc.). You are not required to turn in the diary itself, but you are required to do one.
  2. Choose an everyday cognitive activity from your diary to describe in detail. Choose carefully. Keep it small and simple. It may be part of your job, or part of a recreational activity, or part of your everyday routine. It should be something that you would have done even if you were not taking this class. Do not attempt to describe a personal relationship, or a private activity, or your reasoning about it. Do not attempt to design an “experiment.” Don’t worry about how representative the activity is.
  3. Describe the cognitive activity as carefully as you can. Begin by describing only those things that can be seen “from the outside,” i.e., could be captured on video or described by an observer. What is “cognitive” about the activity, based on the description of “cognitive” from the readings? Some of the questions you might be able to answer include the following: What function does the cognitive activity perform? How does the activity take advantage of or interact with structure in the environment? Is the activity a common routine, and if so, in what ways? Look for cognitive shortcuts – ways of making a complicated computation into a simple one. Minimize or avoid first-personal descriptions of “what is going through my mind” or “what was going on in my head.” Such things are not available to cognitive researchers, and you may know much less about them than you think!

Turn in a typed description that includes the following:

The Activity: What is the activity being described?

Description: Careful and detailed description of the activity.

Maximum 800 words of text. Additional figures, sketches, images and so on, e.g. structure that was used in the environment, are not included in the page count.

Your job is to produce a document that makes it easy for us to see that you did the reading, thought about the issues, and did some real research. Work on making it concise. Please proofread your papers.

Credit to Ed Hutchins from whom I’ve adapted this project idea and taken some of the text for the directions.

Distributed Cognition II – 2/19

Read

  • Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Chapters 4-5

Methods Discussion: Cognitive Ethnography I

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Distributed Cognition I – 2/12

Read

  • Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Introduction, Chapters 1-3

Methods Discussion: Human Subjects, Ethics, & the IRB

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Situated Cognition I – 1/29

Read

  • Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice, Chapters 1-4

Methods Discussion: Ethnography & Participant Observation

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Traditions in Psychology and Cognitive Science – 1/22

In this week’s class, we will review the history of different traditions in psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with special attention to mainstream cognitive science and the traditions in psychology and cognitive science that influence the alternative approaches we discuss in the course.

Read

Focus on texts in bold. Familiarize yourself with the other texts, but don’t stress too much about the details.

Methods Discussion: Cognitive Analysis

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Introduction – 1/15

This week we will get an overview of the course topics and assignments, review the syllabus, and discuss the following articles.

Read

Assignment

  • Read articles BEFORE class.
  • Leave a comment below and tell us something about yourself. (You don’t have to use your full name, but enter your UTD email address (it won’t be published) or otherwise enough information for me to figure out who you are.)

Lecture Notes

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Cognition, Culture, and Communication

Cross-listed as EMAC/ATEC 6372: “Approaches to Emergent Media and Communication: Cognition, Culture, and Communication” and ACN 6V81: “Special Topics: Cognition, Culture, and Communication.”

Course Updates

For course updates, check out the blog (HTML / RSS) or Twitter (using the hashtag #UTDCCC). Time-sensitive updates will be sent via email to your official university address.

Course Description

Media theorists interested in how media impacts human minds and culture. Communication scholars and cognitive scientists interested in the empirical, qualitative study of the human mind in its social, cultural, communicative, and technological contexts. HCI, UI, and UX and Emerging Media experts, engineers, and designers who want to better study and understand how communicative systems and cultural artifacts interface with human cognition and experience.

This course covers radical theories of and methodological approaches to three core aspects of the study of the human: cognition, culture, and communication. We will look at challenges to common assumptions about these three aspects and work to build an alternative understanding of them relevant to work in emerging media and communications and human-computer interaction.

Cognition, communication, and culture traditionally mark ontological distinctions as well as disciplinary boundaries. Cognition covers the individual operation of the isolated human mind, and is the domain of psychology (and the associated cognitive sciences). Communication is the interaction of human minds through a medium, and is covered by the eponymous field of study as well as media and information theory. Culture includes the shared knowledge, values, and practices of a larger social group and is the traditional field of anthropology. The humanities cover aspects of culture and communication but are not considered relevant to their “scientific” study. The ideal unification of science would relate these three categories reductively: culture can be reduced to acts of communication, acts of communication can be reduced to the cognitive operation of individual minds… and so on down to the level of physical particles.

We will examine a host of radical challenges to this traditional picture of separate, hierarchically organized ontological categories. We will examine critical and constructive approaches that treat cognition as embodied and enacted, constituted by culture and communication, socially and technologically distributed, extended, and mediated, as well as approaches to culture and communication which recognize them as inherently cognitive activities, rather than the epiphenomenal residue of the operation of individual minds. Rather than individualism and reductionism, we should think of cognition, culture, and communication as mutually co-constituting. We should not study them separately, but instead we should examine cognitive-cultural-communicative (C3) processes and systems. We will look at different theories of the nature of C3 processes and systems as well as qualitative empirical methodologies for their study. Students will apply their understanding of C3 systems to emerging media systems in particular.

Theories and Methods

This course uses several theoretical perspectives and methodological frameworks, and many of them alternatives to the orthodox approaches in cognitive science, psychology, communication, anthropology, and sociology. Here are the main ones you will become familiar with in the course:

In general, methodological discussions in this course will focus on various forms of qualitative research method.

Required Texts

Textbooks are available at Off Campus Books

Addition required readings will be made available via course website.

Further Suggested Readings

  • Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
  • Taylor & Lindlof, Qualitative Communication Research Methods
  • Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things / The Design of Everday Things

Assignments

  • Seminar attendance and participation / discussion questions
  • Weekly assignments and activities
  • Research proposal – proposal for empirical research on a C3 system, based on theories and methods learned in the course.
  • Choose one:
    • Theoretical paper – interpretation of C3 system using theoretical concepts from the course (connecting w/ existing empirical studies)
    • Video Ethnography project – Use cognitive ethnography and other methods from the course to study a C3 system in the wild.

Course Schedule

Click to see readings and assignments.

  1. 1/15 – Introduction
  2. 1/22 – Traditions in Psychology and Cognitive Science
  3. 1/29 – Situated Cognition I – The Problem of Cognitive Theory in Practice
  4. 2/5 – Situated Cognition II – Putting Practice in Theory
  5. 2/12 – Distributed Cognition I – Ship Navigation as a Cognitive Process
  6. 2/19 – Distributed Cognition II – The Social Organization of Cognition
  7. 2/26 – Distributed Cognition III – Learning in DCog Systems
  8. 3/5 – Distributed Cognition IV – Cognition as a Cultural Practice + Cognitive Ethnography
    3/10-3/16 – Spring Break!
  9. 3/19 – Cultural Psychology I – A Tale of Two Psychologies
  10. 3/26 – Cultural Psychology II – Keeping Culture in Mind
  11. 4/2 – Cultural Psychology III – Researching Cultural-Historical Activity Systems
  12. 4/9 – Actor-Network-Theory I – Following Controversies
  13. 4/16 – Actor-Network-Theory II – Tracing Associations, Reassembling Collectives
  14. 4/23 – Productive Encounters
  15. 4/30 – Presentations & Wrap-Up

Course Policies and Expectations