Cognition in context (VR Swe Research Links)

Exploratory investigation of embedded thought, or thinking in context, including a pilot study on the effects of cultural context on learning. Abstract: Cognitive processes are distributed over social, physical, and cultural artefacts in the environment that function as resources that afford certain ways of thinking while excluding others, and that enhance cognitive processing in specific areas. We describe cognition and more specifically problem-solving as embodied activities conditioned by the environment. The coupling between environment and mind in a given context allows for dynamic changes in styles of thinking that increase the complexity of thought, something than in turn will increase the complexity of the particular environmental structure (specific to that context), and so on in an accelerating loop. We predict that contextual factors have an essential impact on how agents think and on the efficiency of ways of thinking. The major purpose of the planning project is to give a rough, preliminary analysis of which these contextual factors are and how to test them. The hypothesis is investigated by comparative analysis of data from a problem-solving and learning task, collected in Sweden and India, according to an experimental paradigm developed by PhD Maria Larsson, CED.

Cognition and problem-solving are theoretically and empirically explored as embodied activities that are conditioned by their environment.