Saturday, January 04, 2020

Distributed Cognition and how Ants Navigate


Distributed Cognition and how Ants Navigate
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition_in_the_Wild

Simon (1981) offered a parable as a way of emphasizing the importance of the environment for cognition . He argued that , as we watch the complicated movements of an ant on a beach, we may be tempted to attribute to the ant some complicated program for constructing the path taken. In fact, Simon says, that trajectory tells us more about the beach than about the ant.

 I would like to extend the parable to a beach with a community of ants and a history . Rather than watch a single ant for a few minutes , as psychologists are wont to do, let us be anthropologists and move in and watch a community of ants over weeks and months . Let us assume that we arrive just after a storm , when the beach is a tabula rasa for the ants. Generations of ants comb the beach. They leave behind them short -lived chemical trails , and where they go they inadvertently move grains of sand as they pass. Over months , paths to likely food sources develop as they are visited again and again by ants following first the short -lived chemical trails of their fellows and later the longer -lived roads produced by a history of heavy ant traffic .

After months of watching , we decide to follow a particular ant on an outing . We may be impressed by how cleverly it visits every high -likelihood food location . This ant seems to work so much more efficiently than did its ancestors of weeks ago. Is this a smart ant? Is it perhaps smarter than its ancestors? No, it is just the same dumb sort of ant, reacting to its environment in the same ways its ancestors did .

 But the environment is not the same.   It is a cultural environment . Generations of ants have left their marks on the beach, and now a dumb ant has been made to appear smart through its simple interaction with the residua of the history of its ancestor's actions .

Simon was obviou sly right : in watching the ant, we learn more about the beach than about what is inside the ant. And in watching people thinking in the wild , we may be learning more about their
environment for thinking than about what is inside them .  

Having realized this , we should not pack up and leave the beach, concluding that we cannot learn about cognition here. The environments of human thinking are not " natural " environments . They are artificial through and through .

Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers . At present, so few of us have taken the time to study these environments seriously as organizers of cognitive activity that we have little sense of their role in the construction of thought.