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664Distrubuted Cognition, Coordination and Environmental DesignProceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science. 1999.The type of principles which cognitive engineers need to design better work environments are principles which explain interactivity and distributed cognition: how human agents interact with themselves and others, their work spaces, and the resources and constraints that populate those spaces. A first step in developing these principles is to clarify the fundamental concepts of environment, coordination, and behavioural function. Using simple examples, I review changes the distributed perspective…Read more
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360Running it through the bodyProceedings of the 34th Annual Cognitive Science Society 34 593-598. 2012.Video data from three large captures of choreographic dance making was analyzed to determine if there is a difference between participant knowledge – the knowledge an agent acquires by being the cause of an action – and observer knowledge – the knowledge an observer acquires through close attention to someone else’s performance. The idea that there might be no difference has been challenged by recent findings about the action observation network and tacitly challenged by certain tenets in enacti…Read more
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661Design and Evaluation of a Wireless Electronic Health Records System for Field Care in Mass Casualty SettingsJournal of the American Medical Informatic Association 18 (6): 842-852. 2011.There is growing interest in the use of technology to enhance the tracking and quality of clinical information available for patients in disaster settings. This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD).
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516Perceptive Actions in TetrisProceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium. 1992.Cognitive organisms have three rather different techniques for intelligently regulating their intake of environmental information. In order of the time needed to uncover information they are: 1. control of attention: within an image produced by a given sensor certain elements can be selected for additional processing; 2. control of gaze: the orientation and resolution (center of foveation) of the sensor can be regulated to create a new image; 3. control of activity: certain non-perceptual actio…Read more
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770The intelligent use of spaceArtificial Intelligence 73 (1--2): 31-68. 1995.The objective of this essay is to provide the beginning of a principled classification of some of the ways space is intelligently used. Studies of planning have typically focused on the temporal ordering of action, leaving as unaddressed questions of where to lay down instruments, ingredients, work-in-progress, and the like. But, in having a body, we are spatially located creatures: we must always be facing some direction, have only certain objects in view, be within reach of certain others. How…Read more
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815Interactivity and multimedia interfacesInstructional Science 25 79-96. 1997.Multimedia technology offers instructional designers an unprecedented opportunity to create richly interactive learning environments. With greater design freedom comes complexity. The standard answer to the problems of too much choice, disorientation, and complex navigation is thought to lie in the way we design interactivity in a system. Unfortunately, the theory of interactivity is at an early state of development. After critiquing the decision cycle model of interaction—the received theory in…Read more
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1Putting a price on cognitionIn Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 261--280. 1991.
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3192Thinking with the BodyProceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (T): 176-194. 2010.To explore the question of physical thinking – using the body as an instrument of cognition – we collected extensive video and interview data on the creative process of a noted choreographer and his company as they made a new dance. A striking case of physical thinking is found in the phenomenon of marking. Marking refers to dancing a phrase in a less than complete manner. Dancers mark to save energy. But they also mark to explore the tempo of a phrase, or its movement sequence, or the intention…Read more
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50Foundations of AI: The big issuesArtificial Intelligence 47 (1-3): 3-30. 1991.The objective of research in the foundations of Al is to explore such basic questions as: What is a theory in Al? What are the most abstract assumptions underlying the competing visions of intelligence? What are the basic arguments for and against each assumption? In this essay I discuss five foundational issues: (1) Core Al is the study of conceptualization and should begin with knowledge level theories. (2) Cognition can be studied as a disembodied process without solving the symbol grounding …Read more
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403Utility Curves, Mean Opinion Scores Considered BiasedProceedings of the Seventh Interna- Tional Workshop on Quality of Service. 1999.Mechanisms for QoS provisioning in communication networks range from flow-based resource reservation schemes, providing QoS guarantees, through QoS differentiation based on reservation aggregation techniques to adaptation of applications, compensating for incomplete reservations. Scalable, aggregation-based reservations can also be combined with adaptations for a more flexible and robust overall QoS provisioning. Adaptation is particularly important in wireless networks, where reservations schem…Read more
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Creative Cognition in ChoreographyProceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computational Creativity 1-6. 2011.Contemporary choreography offers a window onto creative processes that rely on harnessing the power of sensory sys- tems. Dancers use their body as a thing to think with and their sensory systems as engines to simulate ideas non- propositionally. We report here on an initial analysis of data collected in a lengthy ethnographic study of the making of a dance by a major choreographer and show how translating between different sensory modalities can help dancers and choreographer to be more creativ…Read more
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2377Problem Solving and Situated CognitionThe Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition 264-306. 2009.In the course of daily life we solve problems often enough that there is a special term to characterize the activity and the right to expect a scientific theory to explain its dynamics. The classical view in psychology is that to solve a problem a subject must frame it by creating an internal representation of the problem’s structure, usually called a problem space. This space is an internally generable representation that is mathematically identical to a graph structure with nodes and links. Th…Read more
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8Why We Use Our Hands When We ThinkProceedings of the Seventheenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 1995.A complementary strategy can be defined as any organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads. Typical organizing activities include pointing, arranging the position and orientation of nearby objects, writing things down, manipulating counters, rulers or other artifacts that can encode the state of a process or simplify perception. To illustrate the idea of a complementary strategy, a simple experiment was performed in which subjects were asked to determine the do…Read more
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381Multi-tasking and Cost Structure, Implications for DesignProceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 1143-1148. 2005.I argue that it is not possible to accurately represent our task settings as close environments with a single well defined cost structure. Natural environments are places where many things are done, often at the same time, and often by many people. To appreciate the way such invariants of everyday life affect design I present a case study, a micro-analysis of espresso making at Starbucks to show the challenges facing a cost structure approach.
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907Complementary Strategies: Why we use our hands when we thinkProceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (T): 161-175. 1995.A complementary strategy can be defined as any organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads. Typical organizing activities include pointing, arranging the position and orientation of nearby objects, writing things down, manipulating counters, rulers or other artifacts that can encode the state of a process or simplify perception. To illustrate the idea of a complementary strategy, a simple experiment was performed in which subjects were asked to determine the do…Read more
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15Myślenie za pomocą reprezentacji zewnętrznychAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 5 (1): 94-125. 2014.
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934Explaining Artifact EvolutionCognitive Life of Things. 2006.Much of a culture’s history – its knowledge, capacity, style, and mode of material engagement – is encoded and transmitted in its artifacts. Artifacts crystallize practice; they are a type of meme reservoir that people interpret though interaction. So, in a sense, artifacts transmit cognition; they help to transmit practice across generations, shaping the ways people engage and encounter their world. So runs one argument.
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773Some Epistemic Benefits of Action-Tetris, a Case StudyProceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 1992.We present data and argument to show that in Tetris—a real-time interactive video game—certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as being used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction. To substantiate our position we have implemented a computational laboratory that lets us …Read more
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8758A Few Thoughts on Cognitive OverloadIntellectica 1 (30): 19-51. 2000.This article addresses three main questions: What causes cognitive overload in the workplace? What analytical framework should be used to understand how agents interact with their work environments? How can environments be restructured to improve the cognitive workflow of agents? Four primary causes of overload are identified: too much tasking and interruption, and inadequate workplace infrastructure to help reduce the need for planning, monitoring, reminding, reclassifying information, etc… The…Read more
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459Putting a Price on CognitionSouthern Journal of Philosophy 26 (S1): 119-135. 1988.In this essay I shall consider a certain methodological claim gaining currency in connectionist quarters: The claim that variables are costly to implement in PDP systems and hence are not likely to be as important in cognitive processing as orthodox theories of cognition assume.
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52Today the earwig, tomorrow man?Artificial Intelligence 47 (1-3): 161-184. 1991.A startling amount of intelligent activity can be controlled without reasoning or thought. By tuning the perceptual system to task relevant properties a creature can cope with relatively sophisticated environments without concepts. There is a limit, however, to how far a creature without concepts can go. Rod Brooks, like many ecologically oriented scientists, argues that the vast majority of intelligent behaviour is concept-free. To evaluate this position I consider what special benefits accrue …Read more
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508Image-dependent interaction of imagery and visionAmerican Journal of Psychology 343-366. 2003.The influence of imagery on perception depends on the content of the mental image. Sixty-three students responded to the location of the 2 hands of a clock while visualizing the correct or an incorrect clock. Reaction time was shorter with valid cueing. Could this have resulted from visual acquisition strategies such as planning visual saccades or shifting covert attention? No. in this study, a crucial control condition made participants look at rather than visualize the cue. Acquisition strateg…Read more
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31PDP Learnability and Innate Knowledge of LanguageIn Steven Davis (ed.), Connectionism: Theorye and Practice, Oxford University Press. 1991.It is sometimes argued that if PDP networks can be trained to make correct judgements of grammaticality we have an existence proof that there is enough information in the stimulus to permit learning grammar by inductive means alone. This seems inconsistent superficially with Gold's theorem and at a deeper level with the fact that networks are designed on the basis of assumptions about the domain of the function to be learned. To clarify the issue I consider what we should learn from Gold's the…Read more
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683When doing the wrong thing is rightProceedings of the 34th Annual Cognitive Science Society. 2012.We designed an experiment to explore the learning effectiveness of three different ways of practicing dance movements. To our surprise we found that partial modeling, called marking in the dance world, is a better method than practicing the complete phrase, called practicing full-out; and both marking and full-out are better methods than practicing by repeated mental simulation. We suggest that marking is a form of practicing a dance phrase aspect-by-aspect. Our results also suggest that prior w…Read more
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107The degree to which information is encoded explicitly in a representation is related to the computational cost of recovering or using the information. Knowledge that is implicit in a system need not be represented at all, even implicitly, if the cost of recovering it is prohibitive.
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269Worldlets, 3D Thumbnails for 3D BrowsingProceedings of the Computer Human Interaction Society ACM Press. 1998.Dramatic advances in 3D Web technologies have recently led to widespread development of virtual world Web browsers and 3D content. A natural question is whether 3D thumbnails can be used to find one’s way about such 3D content the way that text and 2D thumbnail images are used to navigate 2D Web content. We have conducted an empirical experiment that shows interactive 3D thumbnails, which we call worldlets, improve travelers’ landmark knowledge and expedite wayfinding in virtual environments.
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1Complementary Strategies - Why We Use Our Hands When We ThinkProceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (T): 161-175. 1995.A complementary strategy can be defined as any organizing activity which recruits external elements to reduce cognitive loads. Typical organizing activities include pointing, arranging the position and orientation of nearby objects, writing things down, manipulating counters, rulers or other artifacts that can encode the state of a process or simplify perception. To illustrate the idea of a complementary strategy, a simple experiment was performed in which subjects were asked to determine the do…Read more
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296Quantifying the Relative Roles of Shadows, Steropsis, and Aocal Accomodation in 3D VisualizationThe 3rd IASTED International Conference on Visualization, Imaging, and Image Processing. 2003.The goal of three-dimensional visualization is to present information in such a way that the viewer suspends disbelief and uses the screen imagery the same way as he or she would use an identical, real 3D scene. To do this effectively, programmers employ a variety of 3D depth cues. Our own anecdotal experience says that shadows and stereopsis are two of the best for visualization. The nice thing is that both of these are possible to do in interactive programs. They sacrifice a certain amount of …Read more
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University of California, San DiegoProfessor
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Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPost-doctoral fellow
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |
Cognitive Sciences, Misc |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |