•  7
    Consistency and Variation in Reasoning About Physical Assembly
    with William P. McCarthy and Judith E. Fan
    Cognitive Science 47 (12). 2023.
    The ability to reason about how things were made is a pervasive aspect of how humans make sense of physical objects. Such reasoning is useful for a range of everyday tasks, from assembling a piece of furniture to making a sandwich and knitting a sweater. What enables people to reason in this way even about novel objects, and how do people draw upon prior experience with an object to continually refine their understanding of how to create it? To explore these questions, we developed a virtual tas…Read more
  •  10
    Time Course of Creativity in Dance
    with Catherine J. Stevens and Daniel W. Piepers
    Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
    Time-motion studies revolutionized the design and efficiency of repetitive work last century. Would time-idea studies revolutionize the rules of intellectual/creative work this century? Collaborating with seven professional dancers, we set out to discover if there were any significant temporal patterns to be found in a timeline coded to show when dancers come up with ideas and when they modify or reject them. On each of 3 days, the dancers were given a choreographic problem to help them generate…Read more
  •  5
    Foreword
    Artificial Intelligence 47 (1-3): 1. 1991.
  •  4
    Interactivity and Thought
    with Susan Goldin-Meadow, Herb Clark, and Yvonne Rogers
  •  37
    Strategie komplementarne: Dlaczego używamy rąk, kiedy myślimy
    Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (T). 2012.
    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
  •  36
    Myślenie za pomocą ciała
    Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (T): 176-192. 2012.
    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
  •  1287
    Thinking With External Representations
    AI and Society 25 (4): 441-454. 2010.
    Why do people create extra representations to help them make sense of situations, diagrams, illustrations, instructions and problems? The obvious explanation— external representations save internal memory and com- putation—is only part of the story. I discuss seven ways external representations enhance cognitive power: they change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facil…Read more
  •  1103
    Adapting the Environment instead of Oneself
    Adaptive Behavior 4 (3-4): 415-452. 1996.
    This paper examines some of the methods animals and humans have of adapting their environment. Because there are limits on how many different tasks a creature can be designed to do well in, creatures with the capacity to redesign their environments have an adaptive advantage over those who can only passively adapt to existing environmental structures. To clarify environmental redesign I rely on the formal notion of a task environment as a directed graph where the nodes are states and the links a…Read more
  •  1968
    In dance, there is a practice called ‘marking’. When dancers mark, they execute a dance phrase in a simplified, schematic or abstracted form. Based on our interviews with professional dancers in the classical, modern, and contemporary traditions, it is fair to assume that most dancers mark in the normal course of rehearsal and practice. When marking, dancers use their body-in-motion to represent some aspect of the full-out phrase they are thinking about. Their stated reason for marking is that i…Read more
  •  539
    The use of wireless, electronic, medical records and communications in the prehospital and disaster field is increasing.
Objective: This study examines the role of wireless, electronic, medical records and com- munications technologies on the quality of patient documentation by emergency field responders during a mass-casualty exercise.
  •  460
    Situating Instructions
    European Perspectives on Cognitive Science. 2011.
    A videographic study of origami is presented in which subjects were observed making four different origami objects under five modes of instruction: photos + captions, illustrations-only, illustrations with small captions, illustrations with large captions, and text-only as control. The objective of the study was to explore the gestures and other actions that subjects produce as they try to follow instructions rather than to determine the most effective style of instruction per se. We found that …Read more
  •  11375
    Distributed Cognition, Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research
    with Jim Hollan and Edwin Hutchins
    ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7 (2): 174-196. 2000.
    We are quickly passing through the historical moment when people work in front of a single computer, dominated by a small CRT and focused on tasks involving only local information. Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction o advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which …Read more
  •  596
    Can virtual engagement enable the sort of interactive coupling with objects enjoyed by archaeologists who are physically present at a site? To explore this question I consider three points: 1) Tangible interaction: What role does encounter by muscle and sinew play in experiencing and understanding objects? 2) Thinking with things. What sorts of interactions are involved when we manipulate things to facilitate thought? 3) Projection and imagination. Archaeological inquiry involves processes beyon…Read more
  •  969
    The Context of Work
    Human-Computer Interaction 16 305-322. 2001.
    The question of how to conceive and represent the context of work is explored from the theoretical perspective of distributed cognition. It is argued that to understand the office work context we need to go beyond tracking superficial physical attributes such as who or what is where and when and consider the state of digital resources, people’s concepts, task state, social relations, and the local work culture, to name a few. In analyzing an office more deeply, three concepts are especially help…Read more
  •  301
    Adaptable Rooms, Virtual Collaboration and Cognitive Workflow
    Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 1998.
    This paper introduces the concept of Adaptive Rooms, which are virtual environments able to dynamically adapt to users’ needs, including ‘physical’ and cognitive workflow requirements, number of users, differing cognitive abilities and skills. Adaptive rooms are collections of virtual objects, many of them self-transforming objects, housed in an architecturally active room with information spaces and tools. An ontology of objects used in adap- tive rooms is presented. Virtual entities are classi…Read more
  •  703
    Projection, Problem Space and Anchoring
    Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2310-2315. 2009.
    When people make sense of situations, illustrations, instructions and problems they do more than just think with their heads. They gesture, talk, point, annotate, make notes and so on. What extra do they get from interacting with their environment in this way? To study this fundamental problem, I looked at how people project structure onto geometric drawings, visual proofs, and games like tic tac toe. Two experiments were run to learn more about projection. Projection is a special capacity, simi…Read more
  •  384
  • Poznanie ucieleśnione i magiczna przyszłość projektowania interakcji
    Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 4 (2). 2013.
  •  545
    Knowledge, Explicit vs Implicit
    Oxford Companion to Consciousness 397-402. 2009.
    In the scientific study of mind a distinction is drawn between explicit knowledge— knowledge that can be elicited from a subject by suitable inquiry or prompting, can be brought to consciousness, and externally expressed in words—and implicit knowledge—knowledge that cannot be elicited, cannot be made directly conscious, and can- not be articulated. Michael Polanyi (1967) argued that we usually ‘know more than we can say’. The part we can articulate is explicitly known; the part we cannot is imp…Read more
  •  96
    Metacognition, Distributed Cognition and Visual Design
    In Peter Gardenfors, Petter Johansson & N. J. Mahwah (eds.), Cognition, education, and communication technology, Erlbaum Associates. pp. 147--180. 2005.
    Metacognition is associated with planning, monitoring, evaluating and repairing performance Designers of elearning systems can improve the quality of their environments by explicitly structuring the visual and interactive display of learning contexts to facilitate metacognition. Typically page layout, navigational appearance, visual and interactivity design are not viewed as major factors in metacognition. This is because metacognition tends to be interpreted as a process in the head, rather tha…Read more
  •  1547
    Creative Cognition in Choreography
    Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computational Creatifity. 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
  •  425
    When is Information Explicitly Represented?
    The Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science 340-365. 1992.
    Computation is a process of making explicit, information that was implicit. In computing 5 as the solution to ∛125, for example, we move from a description that is not explicitly about 5 to one that is. We are drawing out numerical consequences to the description ∛125. We are extracting information implicit in the problem statement. Can we precisely state the difference between information thati s implicit in a state, structure or process and information that is explicit?
  •  809
    Distrubuted Cognition, Coordination and Environmental Design
    Proceedings 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
  •  422
    Running it through the body
    Proceedings 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
  •  609
    Design and Evaluation of a Wireless Electronic Health Records System for Field Care in Mass Casualty Settings
    with L. A. Lenert, W. G. Griswold, C. Buono, J. Lyon, R. Rao, and T. C. Chan
    Journal 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).
  •  771
    The intelligent use of space
    Artificial 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
  •  432
    Perceptive Actions in Tetris
    with Paul Maglio
    Proceedings 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
  •  1
    Putting a price on cognition
    In Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 261--280. 1991.
  •  754
    Interactivity and multimedia interfaces
    Instructional 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