Public webpage for sharing information about Dr. Joyner's CS6750 - Human Computer Interaction course in Spring 2022.
Topic: distributed cognitive system presented as an analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner.
The task is to control the configuration of the airplane to match the changes in speed required for maneuvering in the approach and landing.
The cockpit system remembers its speeds, and the memory process emerges from the activity of the pilots. The memory of the cockpit, however, is not made primarily of pilot memory.
Topic: compares three approaches to the study of context: activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition
The situated action perspective has provided a much-needed corrective to the rationalistic accounts of human behavior from traditional cognitive science. It exhorts us not to depend on rigidly conceived notions of inflexible plans and goals and invites us to take careful notice of what people are actually doing in the flux of real activity.
Activity theory and distributed cognition are very close in spirit, as we have seen, and it is my belief that the two approaches will mutually inform, and even merge, over time, though activity theory will continue to probe questions of consciousness outside the purview of distributed cognition as it is presently formulated.
Author believes that activity theory is offers more richness and depth when compared to situated action. Author believes that having the situation as the primary determinant of an activity is unsatisfying. According to the author:
Situated action models make it difficult to go beyond the particularities of the immediate situation for purposes of generalization and comparison… Situated action models, then, have two key problems: (1) they do not account very well for observed regularities and durable, stable phenomena that span individual situations, and (2) they ignore the subjective. The first problem is partially addressed by situated action accounts that posit routines of one type or another (as discussed earlier).
The author believes subject’s object is important and by situated action leaving this out, we cannot account for details which may be of interest.