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Early modern conversionsconversions
ReligionsCulturesCognitive ecologies
Cognitive Ecologies workshop28 August 2013John Sutton & Lyn Tribble
http://www.johnsutton.net/
Cognitive Ecologiesworkshop
Outline1.Cognitive Ecology: exercise2.Distributed cognitive ecologies: an overview3.Example: the cognitive ecology of early modern theatre4.Open discussion
5.Break
6.Contemporary case studies7.Historical case studies8.Historicizing cognitive ecologies
1. Keys: an exercise in cognitive ecology
A cognitive ecology of keys.
Each group of 3 needs one person with their usual set ofkeys on them now.
1. Without showing the set ofkeys or looking at them, pleasedescribe them to your group.
2. Then show the set of keys to your group. The other group members are future historians. They should interview you brieflyabout any points of interest.
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies:‘Cognition’ and ‘Cognitive Science’
‘Cognition’: expand the term not just reflective reasoning not just information processing historical and cultural contingency ‘mind’, too … flexible sense-making capacities, skills, activities seek rich, ‘thick’ descriptions of cognition ‘in the wild’
The ‘cognitive sciences’ and the humanities pluralism not ‘consilience’ resisting neurocentrism thinking, feeling, remembering in and with the world, not about it but don’t let (shared, public, skilful) mental life go missing either
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies: beyond the brain
Human brains areComplex, dynamic, plastic, incompleteRichly structured, but constantly changingDensely internally interconnectedProne to absorb and transform patterns
Densely externally interconnected to body, world, others
Cultural artefactsDirectly moulded by conditions and activities
which we create, maintain, and regulatePerceiving, remembering, attending are
active, constructive, selectiveBetween originary agency and passive structure
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and history
We think, remember, feel, communicate and imagine in rich multi-dimensional social and material contexts
Human brains don’t do much on their own, but are adapted to hook up with diverse external resources
We are epistemic engineers engaged in cognitive niche construction
As intelligent agents, we are cultural and technological by nature, ‘natural-born cyborgs’ (Andy Clark)
The space for history
Bidirectional benefits?- Cognitive ecology needs history and humanities- Can cognitive ecology help history and the
humanities? (Do historians do it already?)
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies
A cognitive ecology isA system of relationships among cognitive processes and structures in a community. Study the ‘webs of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem’ (Edwin Hutchins)Activity and setting, both organized in interaction.
‘Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, think, feel, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments’
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies
Mental activities spread beyond skull and skin, incorporating diverse integrated, coordinated bodily, social, and material resources. neural affective kinesthetic/ embodied phenomenological environmental material technological interpersonal/ social political cultural …
The (individual and collective) coordination of such disparate resources is highly context-specific: the elements in cognitive ecologies, and the balances found between those elements, are historically and culturally highly variable (the plasticity of mind).
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and cognitive/ historical ethnography
Cognitive ethnography and standard cultural ethnography. Similarities: wild; immersion; particularity; interpretation; trouble.Differences: not created meanings, knowledge, and ways of thinking,
but (tacit) microprocesses of construction, negotiation, use.Backgrounds: interaction studies, ethnomethodology, situated
cognition, embodied cognition, instruction and apprenticeship
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and conversion
Conversion is costly, cognitively and emotionally as well as socially. Dramatic individual and collective restructuring of the ecology.
It may sometimes, to some actors, agents, and observers, appear to be a purely ‘inner’ process or experience
But it requires rich resources and support: an embodied, extended, socially distributed, materially scaffolded process
Conversion as turning to or into something elseTransformations in matter, body, politics, religionNothing is the same againBut there is a need for ‘terms to express the before in the after’
2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and conversion
The connections between the past and future, and between social and cultural structure, are present in the microscopic details of both everyday and extraordinary cultural practices.
History animates dynamical systems at multiple timescales & levelsHow? How is history carried in bodies, souls, things, places, social groups,
institutions, routines, and practices?
Challenges for history … which traces?Lyn on the cognitive ecology of early modern theatre
Historical case study: Shakespeare’s theatre
Motivated by desire to explain: Skilled group dynamics and coordination Memory Attention Perception Embodied know-how
Noice and Noice“General Model of Acting Cognition*” Every scene is broken down into “beats” or subgoals Actor analyzes each beat to determine what the exact
words tell him about the character Determines goals of the character in each beat
Actor imaginatively embodies the character Above steps occur recursively throughout rehearsal so
that the actor “gradually absorb[s] the dialogue rather than rote-memorizing it” (115)
Cf. later research into effect of movement (blocking) upon recall
*The nature of expertise in professional acting: a cognitive view
Noice and Noice, “The expertise of professional actors”
First, the actors extract from the script the underlying intentions of the characters, a procedure that often calls for extensive analysis, because the intentions in well-written plays are rarely explicit or obvious. The deep processing involved calls upon such learning factors as perspective taking, problem solving, elaboration, causal attribution, distinctiveness, and overlearning.
Following the analytical phase, actors rehearse and perform their roles by using an approach the authors call "active experiencing" which involves activation of those cognitive-emotive-motor processes inherent in all genuine human transactions.
Conditions of playing compared
Rehearsal times of 4-6 weeks per play
Director Blocking a major
preoccupation, tracked in promptbook
Technologies of lighting, set design, sound
Each actor has full copies of script
Actors usually assembled for a particular production
Modernist plays with low level of ‘surface features’ (Rubin)
Little group rehearsal, constant playing and mounting of new plays
No “director” --stagekeepers?Most blocking left up to
actors, written into lines; cf. social proxemics; hierarchy
Played in ambient light; sound cues and music vital
Actors learned lines from parts; backstage plots for stage management
Stable repertory systemHighly patterned language:
verse
Socially distributed cognitionand apprenticeship
“Groups of skilled practitioners… may be considered as complex systems with socially distributed cognitive properties.” In such a system “specific sensibilities and capacities … are engendered through the active socialization of apprentices into structured and shared contexts of practice” (Grasseni, “Skilled Vision” 47, 48).
Distributed cognition and enskillment: Hutchins
“[O]ne can embed a novice who has social skills but lacks computational skills in such a [complex] network and get useful behaviour out of that novice and the system. . . . the task world is constructed in such a way that the socially and conversationally appropriate thing to do given the tools at hand is also the computationally correct thing to do. That is, one can be functioning well before one knows what one is doing, and one can discover what one is doing in the course of doing it.” --Cognition in the Wild
6. Contemporary Case Studies: domains of flexible sense-making
Cognitive ecology requires integrated study of socially distributed cognition (groups, communication, interaction) materially distributed cognition (cognitive artifacts, wideware)
The coordination of these disparate resources transforms minds
Find contexts in which to study integrated domains of cognitive activity: remembering, feeling, planning, skilled movement, making, imagining, decision-making, communicating …
Settings integrating physical, social, and conceptual space
Everyday examples Note-taking, or writing an academic paper Tracking appointments (personal, family ...) Navigating Committee decision-making over time Listening to music
6. Cognitive Ecologies:contemporary case studies
The intelligent use of space (David Kirsh)
Jean Lave: maths skills in grocery shopping and Liberian tailors
Ed Hutchins’ domains: •marine navigation - modern, premodern, and Micronesian•organization of routine in pilots •San Diego surfing culture
6. Cognitive Ecologies: contemporary case studies
Some more domains in which these approaches have been used
Airline cockpit (how the cockpit remembers its speed)control rooms for nuclear power plantkids playing in the street in LAfeatures in archaeological practicehuman-animal interactionbartenders and cocktail ordersscientific labsskilled vision in Italian agriculture
High-level categorizations work by way of low-level trained-up cultural-cognitive skills. Attention, vision, senses, memory, judgement, conversation, skill.
6. Cognitive Ecologies:contemporary case studies
David Kirsh working with Wayne McGregor and Random DanceChoreographic cognition in a large-scale modern dance project
Thinking with the body: marking and riffingMixing qualitative and quantitative methods
Dealing with ephemeral movement skillCompare challenges for historians
The Literacy Thesis
“Writing restructures consciousness” or “Writing is a technology that restructures thought” (Walter Ong)
“Writing allowed a quantum jump in human consciousness, in cognitive awareness” (Jack Goody)
Eisenstein-Johns Smackdown Print helped to “reorder the thoughts of
all readers” (Eisenstein) “Readers …suffer the fate of obliteration;
their intelligence and skill is reattributed to the printed page” (Johns) [Johns’ argument is akin to saying] “guns don
’t kill, people do.” (Eisenstein) [Eisenstein’s argument is akin to saying]
‘guns don’t kill people, society kills people.’ [Johns]
Cognitive Ecologiesworkshop
Thanks!
John Sutton, Macquarie University, [email protected] http://www.johnsutton.net
Lyn Tribble, Otago University, [email protected]