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.
