Situated cognition

Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.

Situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead, knowing exists in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context.

History

While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology in the late twentieth century, it shares many principles with older fields such as critical theory, anthropology (Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger, 1991), philosophy (Martin Heidegger, 1968), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989), and sociolinguistics theories (Bakhtin, 1981) that rejected the notion of truly objective knowledge and the principles of Kantian empiricism.

Lucy Suchman's work on situated action at Xerox Labs was instrumental in popularizing the idea that an actor's understanding of how to perform work results from reflecting on interactions with the social and material (e.g. technology-mediated) situation in which she or he acts. More recent perspectives of situated cognition have focused on and draw from the concept of identity formation as people negotiate meaning through interactions within communities of practice. Situated cognition perspectives have been adopted in education, instructional design, online communities and artificial intelligence (see Brooks, Clancey). Grounded Cognition, concerned with the role of simulations and embodiment in cognition, encompasses Cognitive Linguistics, Situated Action, Simulation and Social Simulation theories. Research has contributed to the understanding of embodied language, memory, and the representation of knowledge.

Situated cognition draws a variety of perspectives, from an anthropological study of human behavior in the context of technology-mediated work, to the ecological psychology of the perception-action cycle and intentional dynamics, and even research on robotics with work on autonomous agents at NASA and elsewhere (e.g., work by W. J. Clancey). Early attempts to define situated cognition focused on contrasting the emerging theory with information processing theories dominant in cognitive psychology.

Recently theorists have recognized a natural affinity between situated cognition, New Literacy Studies and new literacies research (Gee, 2010). This connection is made by understanding that situated cognition maintains that individuals learn through experiences. It could be stated that these experiences, and more importantly the mediators that affect attention during these experiences is affected by the tools, technologies and languages used by a socio-cultural group and the meanings given to these by the collective group. New literacies research examines the context and contingencies that language and tool use by individuals and how this changes as the Internet and other communication technologies affect literacy.

Glossary

{| class="wikitable" border="1"

! Term

! Definition

|affordance

|properties of the environment, specified in the information array (flow field) of the individual, that present possibilities for action and are available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon

|attention and intention

|Once an intention (goal) is adopted, the agent's perception (attention) is attuned to the affordances of the environment.

|attunement

|attunement is a persisting state of awareness of the affordances in the environment and how they may be acted upon

|community of practice

|The concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.

|detection of invariants

|perception of what doesn't change across different situations

|direct perception (pick up)

|describes the way an agent in an environment senses affordances without the need for computation or symbolic representation

|effectivities

|The agents ability to recognize and use affordances of the environment.

|embodiment

|as an explanation of cognition emphasizes first that the body exists as part of the world. In a dynamic process, perception and action occurring through and because of the body being in the world, interact to allow for the processes of simulation and representation.

|legitimate peripheral participation

|the initial stage(s) of a person's active membership in a community of practice to which he or she has access and the opportunity to become a full participant.

|perceiving and acting cycle

|Gibson (1986) described a continuous perception-action cycle, which is dynamic and ongoing. Agents perceive and act with intentionality in the environment at all times.

Key principles

Affordances/effectivities

James J. Gibson introduced the idea of affordances as part of a relational account of perception. Perception should not be considered solely as the encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind, but as an element of an individual's interaction with her environment (Gibson, 1977). Central to his proposal of an ecological psychology was the notion of affordances. Gibson proposed that in any interaction between an agent and the environment, inherent conditions or qualities of the environment allow the agent to perform certain actions with the environment. He defined the term as properties in the environment that presented possibilities for action and were available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon.

Gibson focused on the affordances of physical objects, such as doorknobs and chairs, and suggested that these affordances were directly perceived by an individual instead of mediated by mental representations such as mental models. It is important to note that Gibson's notion of direct perception as an unmediated process of noticing, perceiving, and encoding specific attributes from the environment, has long been challenged by proponents of a more category-based model of perception.

This focus on agent-situation interactions in ecological psychology was consistent with the situated cognition program of researchers such as James G. Greeno (1994, 1998), who appreciated Gibson's apparent rejection of the factoring assumptions underlying experimental psychology. The situated cognition perspective focused on "perception-action instead of memory and retrieval…A perceiving/acting agent is coupled with a developing/adapting environment and what matters is how the two interact". Greeno (1994) also suggested that affordances are "preconditions for activity," and that while they do not determine behavior, they increase the likelihood that a certain action or behavior will occur.

Shaw, Turvey, & Mace (as cited by Greeno, 1994) later introduced the term effectivities, the abilities of the agent that determined what the agent could do, and consequently, the interaction that could take place. Perception and action were co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which acted 'in the moment' together. Therefore, the agent directly perceived and interacted with the environment, determining what affordances could be picked up, based on his effectivities. This view is consistent with Norman's (1988) theory of "perceived affordances," which emphasizes the agent's perception of an object's utility as opposed to focusing on the object itself.

An interesting question is the relationship between affordances and mental representations as set forth in a more cognitivist perspective. While Greeno (1998) argues that attunements to affordances are superior to constructs such as schemata and mental models, Glenberg & Robertson (1999) suggested that affordances are the building blocks of mental models.

Perception (variance/invariance)

The work of Gibson (1986) in the field of visual perception greatly influences situated cognition. Therefore, the agent directly perceives and interacts with the environment, determining what affordances can be picked up, based on his effectivities, and does not simply recall stored symbolic representations.

Knowing

Situativity theorists recast knowledge not as an entity, thing, or noun, but as knowing as an action or verb. This reciprocal interaction can not be separated from the context and its cultural and historical constructions. through goal-directed activities within cultural contexts which may in turn have larger goals and claims of truth. The adoption of intentions relates to the direction of the agent's attention to the detection of affordances in the environment that will lead to accomplishment of desired goals. Knowing is expressed in the agent's ability to act as an increasingly competent participant in a community of practice. As agents participate more fully within specific communities of practice, what constitutes knowing continuously evolves. through rich contexts that reflect real life learning processes. These practices by youth are viewed as them becoming "pro-ams" and becoming experts in whatever they have developed a passion for.

Language

Individuals don't just read or write texts, they interact with them, and often these interactions involve others in various socio-cultural contexts. Since language is often the basis for monitoring and tracking learning gains in comprehension, content knowledge, and tool use in and out of school, the role of situated cognition in language learning activities is important. Membership and interaction in social and cultural groups is often determined by tools, technologies and discourse use for full participation. Language learning or literacy in various social and cultural groups must include how the groups work with and interact with these texts. specialist-language lessons examines the formal and informal styles and discourses of language use in socio-cultural contexts. A function of specialist-language lessons includes "lucidly functional language", or complex specialist language is usually accompanied by clear and lucid language used to explain the rules, relationships or meanings existing between language and meaning. Conceptualizing is considered to be a "prelinguistic" act, while "knowing" involves creative interaction with symbols in both their interpretation and use for expression. "Schema" develop as neural connections become biased through repeated activations to reactivate in situations that are perceived and conceived as temporally and compositionally similar to previous generalized situations. goal (intention) adoption from among all possible goals (ontological descent). This describes how the learner decides whether or not to adopt a particular goal when presented with a problem. Once a goal is adopted, the learner proceeds by interacting with their environment through intentional dynamics. There are many levels of intentions, but at the moment of a particular occasion, the agent has just one intention, and that intention constrains his behavior until it is fulfilled or annihilated.

Intentional Dynamics: Furthermore, transfer can only "occur when there is a confluence of an individual's goals and objectives, their acquired abilities to act, and a set of affordances for action".

Embodied cognition

The traditional cognition approach assumes that perception and motor systems are merely peripheral input and output devices. However, embodied cognition posits that the mind and body interact 'on the fly' as a single entity. An example of embodied cognition is seen in the area of robotics, where movements are not based on internal representations, rather, they are based on the robot's direct and immediate interaction with its environment. Additionally, research has shown that embodied facial expressions influence judgments, and arm movements are related to a person's evaluation of a word or concept. In the latter example, the individual would pull or push a lever towards his name at a faster rate for positive words, than for negative words. These results appeal to the embodied nature of situated cognition, where knowledge is the achievement of the whole body in its interaction with the world.

Externalism

As to the mind, by and large, situated cognition paves the way to various form of externalism. The issue is whether the situated aspect of cognition has only a practical value or it is somehow constitutive of cognition and perhaps of consciousness itself. As to the latter possibility, there are different positions. David Chalmers and Andy Clark, who developed the hugely debated model of the extended mind, explicitly rejected the externalization of consciousness. For them, only cognition is extended. On the other hand, others, like Riccardo Manzotti explicitly considered the possibility to situate conscious experience in the environment.

Pedagogical implications

Since situated cognition views knowing as an action within specific contexts and views direct instruction models of knowledge transmission as impoverished, there are significant implications for pedagogical practices. First, curriculum requires instructional design that draws on apprenticeship models common in real life. The reflection process includes having students alternate between novice and expert strategies in a problem-solving context, sensitizing them to specifics of an expert performance, and adjustments that may be made to their own performance to get them to the expert level (Collins & Brown, 1988; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Thus, the function of reflection indicates "co-investigation" and/or abstracted replay by students.

Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989) emphasized six critical features of a cognitive apprenticeship that included observation, coaching, scaffolding, modeling, fading, and reflection. Using these critical features, expert(s) guided students on their journey to acquire the cognitive and metacognitive processes and skills necessary to handle a variety of tasks, in a range of situations Reciprocal teaching, a form of cognitive apprenticeship, involves the modeling and coaching of various comprehension skills as teacher and students take turns in assuming the role of instructor.

Anchored instruction

Anchored instruction is grounded in a story or narrative that presents a realistic (but fictional) situation and raises an overarching question or problem (compare with an essential question posed by a teacher). This approach is designed to 1) engage the learner with a problem or series of related problems, 2) require the learner to develop goals and discover subgoals related to solving the problem(s), and 3) provide the learner with extensive and diverse opportunities to explore the problem(s) in a shared context with classmates. For example, a Spanish teacher uses a video drama series focused on the murder of a main character. Students work in small groups to summarize parts of the story, to create hypotheses about the murderer and motive, and to create a presentation of their solution to the class. Stories are often paired so that across the set students can detect the invariant structure of the underlying knowledge (so 2 episodes about distance-rate-time, one about boats and one about planes, so students can perceive how the distance-rate-time relationship holds across differences in vehicles). The ideal smallest set of instances needed provide students the opportunity to detect invariant structure has been referred to as a "generator set" of situations.

The goal of anchored instruction is the engagement of intention and attention. Through authentic tasks across multiple domains, educators present situations that require students to create or adopt meaningful goals (intentions). One of the educator's objectives can be to set a goal through the use of an anchor problem. A classic example of anchored instruction is the Jasper series. The Jasper series includes a variety of videodisc adventures focused on problem formulation and problem solving. Each videodisc used a visual narrative to present an authentic, realistic everyday problem. The objective was for students to adopt specific goals (intentions) after viewing the story and defining a problem. These newly adopted goals guided students through the collaborative process of problem formulation and problem solving.

Perceiving and acting in avatar-based virtual worlds

Virtual worlds provide unique affordances for embodied learning, i.e. hands on, interactive, spatially oriented, that ground learning in experience. Here "embodied" means acting in a virtual world enabled by an avatar.

Contextual affordances of online games and virtual environments allow learners to engage in goal-driven activity, authentic interactions, and collaborative problem-solving – all considered in situated theories of learning to be features of optimal learning. In terms of situated assessment, virtual worlds have the advantage of facilitating dynamic feedback that directs the perceiving/acting agent, through an avatar, to continually improve performance.

Research methodologies

The situative perspective is focused on interactive systems in which individuals interact with one another and physical and representational systems. Research takes place in situ and in real-world settings, reflecting assumptions that knowledge is constructed within specific contexts which have specific situational affordances. Mixed methods and qualitative methodologies are the most prominently used by researchers.

In qualitative studies, methods used are varied but the focus is often on the increased participation in specific communities of practice, the affordances of the environment that are acted upon by the agent, and the distributed nature of knowing in specific communities. A major feature of quantitative methods used in situated cognition is the absence of outcome measures. Quantitative variables used in mixed methods often focus on process over product. For example, trace nodes, dribble files, and hyperlink pathways are often used to track how students interact in the environment.

Critiques of situativity

In "Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation" Vera and Simon wrote: " ... the systems usually regarded as exemplifying Situated Action are thoroughly symbolic (and representational), and, to the extent that they are limited in these respects, have doubtful prospects for extension to complex tasks" Vera and Simon (1993) also claimed that the information processing view is supported by many years of research in which symbol systems simulated "broad areas of human cognition" and that there is no evidence of cognition without representation.

Anderson, Reder and Simon (1996) summarized what they considered to be the four claims of situated learning and argued against each claim from a cognitivist perspective. The claims and their arguments were:

Claim: Activity and learning are bound to the specific situations in which they occur. Argument: Whether learning is bound to context or not depends on both the kind of learning and the way that it is learned.
Claim: Knowledge does not transfer between tasks. Argument: There is ample evidence of successful transfer between tasks in the literature. Transfer depends on initial practice and the degree to which a successive task has similar cognitive elements to a prior task.
Claim: Teaching abstractions is ineffective. Argument: Abstract instruction can be made effective by combining of abstract concepts and concrete examples.
Claim: Instruction must happen in complex social contexts. Argument: Research shows value in individual learning and on focusing individually on specific skills in a skill set.

Anderson, Reder and Simons summarize their concerns when they say:

"What is needed to improve learning and teaching is to continue to deepen our research into the circumstances that determine when narrower or broader contexts are required and when attention to narrower or broader skills are optimal for effective and efficient learning" (p. 10).

Considerations

However, it is important to remember that a theory is neither wrong nor right but provides affordances for certain aspects of a problem. Lave and Wenger recognized this in their ironic comment, "How can we purport to be working out a theoretical conception of learning without engaging in the project of abstraction [decontextualized knowledge] rejected above?" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 38).

References

Notes

Sources

Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1993). Anchored instruction and situated cognition revisited. Educational Technology March Issue, 52-70.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1994). From visual word problems to learning communities: Changing conceptions of cognitive research. In K. McGilly (Ed.) Classroom lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Kugler, P. N., Shaw, R. E., Vicente, K. J., & Kinsella-Shaw, J. (1991). The role of attractors in the self-organization of intentional systems. In R. R. Hoffman and D. S. Palermo (Eds.) Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Education (2nd Ed., pp. 1370–1373). New York: Macmillan Reference.
Wilson, B.B., & Myers, K. M. (2000). Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context. In D. Jonassen, & S. Land (Eds.) Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments. (pp. 57–88). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Young, M., & McNeese, M. (1995). A Situated Cognition Approach to Problem Solving. In P. Hancock, J. Flach, J. Caid, & K. Vicente (Eds.) Local Applications of the Ecological Approach to Human Machine Systems. (pp. 359–391). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Young, M. (2004a). An Ecological Description of Video Games in Education. Proceedings of the International Conference on Education and Information Systems Technologies and Applications (EISTA), July 22, Orlando, FL, pp. 203–208.
Young, M. (2004b). An ecological psychology of instructional design: Learning and thinking by perceiving-acting systems. In D.H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, 2nd Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Citations and further reading

Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.
Collins, A., & Brown, J. (1988). The computer as a tool for learning through reflection. In H. Mandi & A. Lesgold (Eds.), Learning issues for intelligent tutoring systems (pp. 1–18). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Collins, A., Brown, J., & Newman, S. (1989). Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dickinson, D. K., & Neuman, S. B. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2. New York: Guilford Press.
Gallagher, S., Robbins, B.D., & Bradatan, C. (2007). Special issue on the situated body. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 9(2). URL: http://www.janushead.org/9-2/
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated Language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games and good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York: Lang.
Gee, J. P. (2010). A Situated-Sociocultural Approach to Literacy and Technology. In E. Baker (Ed.), The New Literacies: Multiple Perspectives on Research and Practice, pp. 165–193. New York: Guilford Press.
Keller, C. & Keller, J. (1996). Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work. Cambridge University Press ()
Kirshner, D. & Whitson, J. A. (1997) Situated Cognition: Social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum ()
Leadbeater, C., & Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our society and economy. London: Demos.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1983). Child as co-investigator: Helping children gain insight into their own mental processes. In S. Paris, G. Olson, & H. Stevenson (Eds.), Learning and motivation in the classroom (pp. 83–107). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1985). Fostering the development of self-regulation in children's knowledge processing. In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Research and open questions (pp. 563–577). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and situated actions : The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Suchman, L. (1993) Response to Vera and Simon's Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation. Cognitive Science, 17:71—75, 1993