Responsibility of Action and Situated Cognition in Artefact—User Relationship

This paper engages the question of the extended mind hypothesis, specifically in terms of memory and mnemonics. I use the case of an external object which is set to trigger a memory internally, but is not the memory, to explore the idea of extension versus distribution. I use the example of tzitzit, which is a garment worn by observant Jewish men, where is states in scripture that seeing the tassels attached to the garment are supposed to trigger a specific memory. The point of the essay is that extension is merely a metaphysical commitment, and that this commitment leads to some ethical issues.

Mnemonics as signs of memory: semiotics and agency

West

2023

The cognitive advantages of the notebook

Fernandez-Velasco

Nijman

Casati

2023

Notebooks are widely used in a large number of professional and everyday life contexts. The notebook has been widely mentioned in the context of distributed cognition, the extended mind hypothesis and the study of cognitive artefacts. Despite its ubiquity and almost paradigmatic status, to date, there is no dedicated analysis of the notebook qua cognitive artefact, to explain its success and its resilience. Our aim is to fill this gap in the literature by studying a set of cognitive advantages of the notebook. For our analysis, we employ the methodological framework of distributed cognition. Using this framework, we find a series of cognitive advantages at both an individual and at a group level. At an individual level, these include external non-biological memory, the consolidation of long-term biological memory encoding, effects on attention modulation, an enhancement in metacognition and the graphication of thought. At the group level, the cognitive advantages include collaboration, the transference of content from one user to another, group-level metacognition, coordination, and the transformation of the overall epistemological setting in which notebook use takes place.

Enhanced agency and the visual thinking of design

Mendoza-Collazos

2024

Visual thinking is a systematic way to produce knowledge in design by means of mental imagery, spatial reasoning, and the use of an array of visual representations. Pictorial representations such as sketches are crucial for the activity of designing at the early stage of the creative process. Designers see more information in sketches than was actually drawn. The ability to see more information than is sketched out can be seen as an enhanced visual capacity of human agency. Enhanced agency is the prosthetic incorporation of artifacts to improve the original agentive capacities. The incorporation of artifacts to draw raises some fundamental questions: Is the pencil an extension of the mind? Can we think with our hands? What agentive capacities are increased with the use of the pencil? What is the representational status of sketching? The chapter is structured around these key questions to suggest some answers inspired by the work of Göran Sonesson. Using the notion of enhanced agency and the layered model of agency, I explore the way in which the pencil improves the visual thinking of design. In doing so I found that it is important to maintain the principle of asymmetry in cognitive systems to reconsider relational ontology in favor of ecological relationships.