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A three-tiered account of social cognition is set out-along with the corresponding variety of social knowledge that results from this social cognition-and applied to the special case of scientific collaboration. The first tier is socially-facilitated cognition, which results in socially-facilitated knowledge. This is a form of cognition which, while genuinely social (in that social factors play an important explanatory role in producing the target cognitive success), falls short of socially extended cognition. The second tier is socially extended cognition, which generates socially extended knowledge. This form of cognition is social in the specific sense of the information-processing of other agents forms part of the socially extended cognitive process at issue. It is argued, however, that the core notion of socially extended cognition is individual in nature, in that the target cognitive success is significantly creditable to the socially extended cognitive agency of the individual. Socially extended cognition, in its core sense, thus generates individual knowledge. Finally, there is distributed cognition, which generates distributed knowledge. This is where the cognitive successes produced by a research team are attributable to a group agent rather than to individuals within the team. Accordingly, where this form of social cognition generates knowledge (distributed knowledge), the knowledge is irreducibly group knowledge. It is argued that by making clear this three-tiered structure of social scientific knowledge a prima facie challenge is posed for defenders of distributed scientific cognition and knowledge to explain why this form of social knowledge is being exhibited and not one of the two weaker (and metaphysically less demanding) forms of social knowledge.

Teamwork in contexts of remote and hybrid working has become increasingly prevalent. Thus, the importance of developing and enhancing this mode of working is important. Previous literature has focused on the study of within-team diversity, which is why this research takes the perspective of inter-team diversity. This study aims to bring insights into teamwork from a cognitive perspective, using ethnography to compare how teams in different domains diversely organize and function to achieve their goals as distributed cognitive systems. Distributed Cognition is selected as a theoretical approach, especially the Distributed Cognition for Teamwork – CL (DiCoT-CL), which has been used previously in numerous studies relating to teamwork contexts.

Metacognition ("thinking about thinking") depends on representations and metarepresentations, which are usually treated as internal knowledge structures, rather than as external-oriented processes. We explore how multimodal patterns of external semiotic activity (not monomodal and internal symbolic-based processes) can provide a more accurate description of metacognition. To develop our ideas, we examine the act of marking-for-self in theatrical dance. To mark is to perform a dance phrase in a simplified, schematic, or abstract way. When marking, dancers use their bodies in motion to represent some aspects (properties, dynamics, or structures) of the complete dance-phrase they are thinking on. Marking-for-self occurs when dancers mark in their own idiosyncratic manner, a process that potentializes real-time reflection on its own dancing sequences and structures. According to our view, these representations are metacognitive embodied and externalized diagrammatic structures. We detail this phenomenon in light of recent developments in Cognitive Semiotics and diagrammatic reasoning approach.

Allen Newell laid down highly influential principles for the study of cognition with his Systems Levels framework, but it is less well known that this framework also laid down the foundation for understanding social interaction and culture. Although his book Unified Theories of Cognition was focused on the cognitive level, Newell speculated what implications his theory might have for the study of culture. Although these particular ideas did not receive much attention at the time, this paper argues that Newell’s systems levels provide a valuable insight into the connection between brains and culture.

Knowledge diversity is widely acknowledged to be beneficial for collaborative groups engaged in problem solving. An experiment was conducted to determine whether knowledge diversity and assigned task roles for members in an online virtual collaborative group affect group task performance and individual learning and transfer, and to explore the role of explanations as a mediating variable in these effects. Two control conditions were included that involved individual work, with and without self-explanations. Results showed that the frequency of explanations in dyadic discourse were correlated with individual learning, and that groups with knowledge diversity tend to use more explanations. These findings suggest that discussing explanations is a key feature of successful group work that contributes to determining how much individual learning occurs and how well it transfers from collaborative activities to similar, novel tasks.

Where do mathematical insights come from? According to classic accounts, creativity is a multi-stage process that involves combining ideas in novel ways. Evidence for these accounts, however, is drawn from artificial lab-based settings or is zoomed out from the messy, moment-to-moment details of discovery. Here, we examine a video corpus of expert mathematicians generating proofs in an ecologically valid setting. We find that mathematicians begin by creating a variety of inscriptions. They then interact with these inscriptions through gaze, speech, gesture, and writing. When they experience an insight, however, their interactions become unpredictable, and they begin to connect inscriptions in novel ways (quantified by an information-theoretic measure, surprisal). Expert mathematical discovery, we conclude, exhibits the stages and combinatorial processing that have been proposed to characterize creativity. Even at the pinnacle of abstraction, at the highest levels of expertise, new ideas are born when the body discovers unexpected affinities among ideas.

Learning frequently forces us to rely on the good judgment and epistemic vigilance of sources with no more firsthand knowledge of a topic than ourselves, but who may have more second or third- hand knowledge. Yet, being forced to rely on their judgment doesn’t prevent us from evaluating their judgment: one might trust information because it was passed on to you by someone whose epistemic vigilance you trust, but reject it from someone whom you believe lacks good judgment. We present two experiments suggest that by integrating affective cues like anger and surprise along with perceptual access and consensus, children infer what others believe and what the correct answer to a question is. We discuss implications for consensus-based social learning strategies.

According to the diversity-beats-ability theorem, groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers (Hong and Page 2004). This striking claim about the power of cognitive diversity is highly influential within and outside academia, from democratic theory to management of teams in professional organizations. Our replication and analysis of the models used by Hong and Page suggests, however, that both the binary string model and its one-dimensional variant are inadequate for exploring the trade-off between cognitive diversity and ability. Diversity may sometimes beat ability, but the models fail to provide reliable evidence of if and when it does so. We suggest ways in which these important model templates can be improved.

We suggest that some of the mechanisms underlying network effects on cultural evolution are intuitively accessible to laypeople, and may be part of the suite of social learning strategies underlying the human capacity for cumulative culture. Interest in the psychological mechanisms underlying this capacity typically focuses on learners’ ability to identify reliable sources and capacity for high-fidelity imitation. Yet, at the population level, research suggests that network structures themselves may influence cumulative learning by changing individuals’ explore-exploit patterns. In our experiments, adults infer that more proximal or distal clusters in a fragmented network will have more similar or dissimilar technological “styles”, and prefer to seek advice from more distant experts when asked to innovate, but more proximate experts when asked to remember. Commonsense intuitions about how social networks shape our access to information and diversity- fidelity tradeoffs for memory and innovation may make us more effective social learners.

Wildlife field guide books present salient features of species, from colour and form to behaviour, and give their readers a vocabulary to express what these features look like. Such structures for observation, or observational grids, allow users to identify wildlife species through what Law and Lynch have called 'the difference that makes the difference'. In this article, we show how these grids, and the characteristics that distinguish species, change over time in response to wider concerns in the community that use and make the field guides. We use the development of Dutch field guides for dragonflies to show how the ethics of observing wildlife, the recreational value of dragonfly observation, the affordances of observational tools, and biodiversity monitoring and conservation goals all have repercussions for how dragonflies are to be identified. Ultimately, this affects not only how dragonflies are to be observed and identified, but also what is taken to be 'out there'. The article is based on a transdisciplinary cooperation between a dragonfly enthusiast with emic knowledge and access, and an STS researcher. We hope the articulation of our approach might inspire analyses of other observational practices and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Rice production is the core component of the food security strategy in China, but it is also a major source of methane and nitrous oxide. Promoting low-carbon rice farming (LCRF) to increase the carbon sink, decrease carbon emissions, and achieve low-carbon, high-yield production is an inevitable "win-win" choice for achieving "double carbon" targets and guaranteeing national food security. This study contributes to the advancement of research on farmers' adoption decisions and fills gaps in LCRF's technical research on farmers' decision-making behavior. The results also provide a basis for formulating policies to encourage LCRF and protect cultivated land. Methods: This study conducted field research on 2,173 farming households in Jiangxi Province, a traditional agricultural province in China, and examined the effects of personal forces, local forces, and cultural forces on LCRF adoption behavior by introducing the distributed cognition theoretical framework based on a status quo analysis and employing the multivariate ordinal logistic model. Results and discussion: The results of the study showed that: 1) the overall acceptance of LCRF behavior is currently not very high. In the 2173 questionnaires, the mean number of LCRF behavior items accepted by farmers was 3.10 items; 153 farmers did not adopt any LCRF behavior, and only 77 farmers adopted all LCRF behaviors. Most farmers (n = 535) adopted three LCRF behaviors. 2) In distributed cognition affecting LCRF behavior, acceptance was primarily affected by cultural forces, followed by local forces, while the effects of personal forces were limited. Therefore, it is recommended that training and promotion should be increased, policy subsidies should be increased, the land market should be improved, and LCRF demonstrations should be carried out to increase the acceptance of LCRF behavior among rice farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to test the fruitfulness of bringing together two research programmes, Course of Action (PRCA) and Distributed Cognition (PRCD), for the study of human-animal interactions. This development of the PRCA towards an "augmented PRCA" aims to raise new research questions, linked to the integration of animal activities and human-animal interactions in the field of practice analysis. This article makes an empirical contribution to the development of this program by analyzing human-horse communication, in particular the interactions between Cadre Noir écuyers and sauteur horses. To study interspecies interactions, we use several theoretical concepts from these two research programs: cultural practice, mutual appropriationaction, and another concept already explored in previous work, namely sensorimotor empathy. We argue that the cultural practice of airs above the ground, shared by the écuyer and the sauteur, is both a condition and a result of sensorimotor empathy, which develops through a process of mutual appropriation-action. This study confirms the relevance of an "augmented" PRCA to account for animal activities and interspecies interactions, and contributes to a better understanding of the latter. It opens up prospects for new empirical studies to be carried out that highlight the development of mutual sensorimotor empathy within other shared cultural practices between humans and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the gender dimensions of space in response to Witold Wachowski's Distributed Cognition. From Heuristics to Mechanisms [Poznanie rozproszone. Od heurystyk do mechanizmów]. Wachowski's work belongs to the so-called "turn to space," according to which we treat the environment as an integral part of culture, and culture as a cognitive process. By focusing on relevant examples, it illustrates how space, broadly understood, can shape and perpetuate gender stereotypes. It aims to inspire further, in-depth research on the relationship between gender and space (and, more broadly, on cognition and cognitive processes) in the framework of distributed cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of psychopathology in the context of the idea of distributed cognition. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach to the analysis of cognitive systems and the relationships among their underlying components. In the first part of this paper, I describe the key assumptions of distributed cognition and consider its utility in the fields of philosophy of psychiatry and psychology. Having done so, I attempt to depict addiction as a state that cannot be described solely from an individualistic point of view, but rather as a distributed phenomenon. This standpoint corresponds to Hanna Pickard's account and the concept of affordances, which has increasingly been used in the context of psychopathology in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the role of distributed mechanisms in cognitive processes. It discusses the results of research in economics, geography and organization theory on the spatial concentration of actors in innovative industries. Although geographic economics and other disciplines have demonstrated a relationship between geographic concentration and inventiveness and innovation, they have not offered explanation in terms of mechanisms. Employing the concept of distributed mechanisms, this article proposes a reinterpretation of concepts such as buzz and the knowledge spillover effect that geography and economics refer to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of the category of affordances in sociological concepts addressing the relationship between social structure and individual agency. It focuses on two sociological concepts that attempt to capture this relationship in a coherent theoretical approach and without falling into social determinism and excessive individualism. These are critical realism and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus. This paper argues that the category of affordances is a useful tool for describing the relationship between the subject and the environment, allowing one to focus on material factors in the study of social structures, while recognizing the active role of the subject in their co-creation. Particularly promising here is the integration of affordances into the concept of distributed cognition, used in sociology to study sociotechnical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even if the integration of distributed cognition with mechanistic conceptions of explanation can be seen as an interesting move and, if successful, leading to a non-trivial extension of cognitive science research, from the perspective of a distributed cognition theorist, the move should be seen as risky. In the paper, arguing against the proposal of Witold Wachowski (2022), I will try to outline the risks that the aforementioned integration entails and propose an alternative solution, which consists in combining distributed cognition with network theory. This theory (in my opinion) allows for a more fruitful study of patterns of distributed cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to highlight and complement certain themes of the book Distributed Cognition. From Heuristics to Mechanisms [Poznanie rozproszone. Od heurystyk do mechanizmów] (2022). This monograph considers the current situation facing cognitive science from the perspective of the concept of distributed cognition and related research. The book's focus is on the structure of this concept and its place in research paradigms. In light of the current state of cognitive science, here the emphasis is on presenting the still underestimated potential of distributed cognition as a universal understanding of cognition, the actual research implications of this perspective, its relationship with mechanisms and its integrative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than ask if expertise is under threat, this paper uses case studies to show how expertise is enabled. Its appearance can be traced to how the already known evokes sensibility, judging, thinking and languaging. As defined below, it draws on epistemic cycles. Using Secchi and Cowley's (2021) 3M model, this posits a second cut between the micro and the macro. In the mesosphere, people create temporary domains or what William James (1991) calls 'little worlds'. Within these corpora popularia, the new is made possible – expertise sets off unimagined outcomes. Thus, many concerns cannot be solved by scientific correlates of a natural ontological attitude: indeed, the truism clarifies many social challenges. We lack social institutions that dedicate expertise to goals like ecosocial justice and life-sustaining relations. Once the necessary expertise is traced to epistemic cycles, we can demand of institutions that they create bodies that seek to bring a rich future to evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed cognition (DCog) is a member of the family of situativity theories that widens the lens of cognition from occurring solely inside the head to being socially, materially and temporally distributed within a dynamic system. The concept of extending the view of cognition to outside the head of a single health professional is relatively new in the healthcare system. DCog has been increasingly used by researchers to describe many ways in which health professionals perform in teams within structured clinical environments to deliver healthcare for patients. In this Guide, we expound ten central tenets of the macro (grand) theory of DCog (1. Cognition is decentralized in a system; 2. The unit of analysis is the system; 3. Cognitive processes are distributed; 4. Cognitive processes emerge from interactions; 5. Cognitive processes are interdependent; 6. Social organization is a cognitive architecture; 7. Division of labour; 8. Social organization is a system of communication; 9. Buffering and filtering; 10. Cognitive processes are encultured) to provide theoretical insights as well as practical applications to the field of health professions education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present a conversation analytic case study of a video-mediated teleconsultation in which the participants face a problem with the audio connection. During the problem-solving process the interactants need to direct one another’s attention and action in relation to technological artefacts to solve the problem. Video mediation limits physical access to distant participants’ physical ecology, which is overcome by fitting interactional practices to the communicative medium available at a given moment. Drawing on insights from the distributed cognition perspective and the CA perspective on participation, multimodality, and epistemics, we propose specifications to existing theories of problems solving, seeking to develop integrative approaches to real-world problem solving.

Communication involving visualizations in science and applications involves or even requires coordination. Much visualization research focuses on tasks in research or applications and provides valuable insights that help improve these modes and means of communication. That focus and resulting benefits makes a reduction to tasks or defined goals seem amenable for a more thorough consideration of social and cultural aspects. This contribution to the focus topic Insights in Visual Communication suggests that the boundary object concept can greatly help deepen considerations of social and cultural heterogeneity and adds insights and perspectives to better consider social and cultural aspects of visual communication. The theoretical concept of boundary objects, originating in heterogeneous distributed problem solving research, offer a pragmatic basis for enhancing visual communication to improve meaning production. The overarching issue for developing this direction in visual communication can be formulated through a broad question: In heterogeneous situations, how can research enhance communication involving visual objects for problem solving through a consideration of social and cultural aspects? I consider an example of cooperative design of maps to show how research can benefit from a consideration of boundary objects. The example highlights a cooperative mode of visual communication used in decision making involving both explicit and implicit goals and aspects from a cognitive perspective. The potential for improvements and better solutions in visual communication can benefit from a stronger consideration of the boundary objects concept.

An explication of the notion of sports team involves a structural and a teleological element. The basis of a team is structural – a team is a group that containing a Distributed Internal Decision (DID) structure, that is, a structure in which the parts maintain autonomy while seeking a collective goal. A sports team is a team with a game-focused (or ludic) goal. Sports teams are associated with related, but distinct groups: sports organizations and sports communities. These differ in terms of their structure and the temporal orientation of their goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Heersmink argues that self‐narratives are distributed across embodied organisms and their environment, given that their building blocks, autobiographical memories, are distributed. This argument faces two problems. First, it commits a fallacy of composition. Second, it relies on Marya Schechtman's narrative self‐constitution view, which is incompatible with the distributed cognition framework. To solve these problems, this article develops an alternative account of self‐narratives. On this account, we actively connect distributed autobiographical memories through distributed conversational and textual self‐narrative practices. This account enhances our understanding of the memory–narrative nexus and has implications for philosophical conceptions of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interdisciplinary article involves the intertwining of multiple theoretical areas that explore an anti-colonial reading of the fallacies of the Zionist narrative. The article also initiates new directions in postcolonial studies, while focusing on two counter-current travel memoirs about Palestine, by Salman Abu Sitta and Miko Peled. The article shows how the memoirists' thinking can challenge Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine. These counter-current travel memoirs lay the groundwork for new perspectives in post-colonial and memory studies. The article also reads the two counter-current memoirs by allowing interactions between human agents and the cognitive ecosystem to reproduce cognitive cartographies of Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a discussion of the socially extended mind, this paper advances the "not possible without principle" as an alternative to the social parity principle. By charging the social parity principle with reductionism about the social dimension of socially extended processes, the paper offers a new argumentative strategy for the socially extended mind that stresses its existential significance. The "not possible without principle" shows that not only is something more achieved through socially located processes of knowledge building, but also that, and more importantly, what is achieved is something that would not have been possible without social interaction. The social parity principle states that the result of an activity achieved via social interaction should be assumed functionally equivalent to a solitary investigation and is characterized by multiple realisability. Contrary to the social parity principle, the "not possible without principle" holds that the result would not have been achieved without the social interaction between (at least) two agents with specific existential needs. The socially extended mind never happens in a void. This means that the "not possible without" principle should be located in real-life, affectively charged, embodied experiences of skilful interactions between agents. This fundamental conceptual change via reference to the "existential necessity" that regulates socially extended processes is necessary in order to effectively lead the socially extended mind to a truly embedded and embodied account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describing an algorithm can provide a formalization of a specific process. However, different ways of conceptualizing algorithms foreground certain issues while obscuring others. This article attempts to define an algorithm in a broad sense as a cultural activity of key importance to make sense of socio-cognitive structures. It also attempts to develop a sharper account on the interaction between humans and tools, symbols and technologies. Rather than human or machine-centered analyses, I draw upon sociological and anthropological theories that underline social practices to propose expanding our understanding of an algorithm through the notion of ‘collective intentionalities’. To make this term clear, a brief historical review is presented, followed by an argumentation on how to incorporate it in an integral perspective. The article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term. It develops a discussion along the lines of cognitive anthropology and the cognitive sciences, therefore advancing a definition that is grounded in observed practices as well as in modeled descriptions. The benefit of this approach is that it encourages scholars to explore cognitive structures via archaeologies of technological assemblages, where intentionalities play a defining role in understanding socio-structured practices and cognitive ecologies.

Science is supposed to be a self-correcting endeavor, but who is “the scientific expert” that corrects faulty science? We grouped traditional conceptualizations of expertise in psychology under three classes (substantialist, implicitist, and social conventionalist), and then examined how these approaches affect scientific self-correction in reference to various components of the credibility crisis such as fraud/QRPs, the inadequate number of replication studies, challenges facing big team science, and perverse incentives. Our investigation pointed out several problems with the traditional views. First, traditional views conceptualize expertise as something possessed, not performed, ignoring the epistemic responsibility of experts. Second, expertise is conceived as an exclusively individual quality, which contradicts the socially distributed nature of scientific inquiry. Third, some aspects of expertise are taken to be implicit or relative to the established research practices in a field, which leads to disputes over replicability and makes it difficult to criticize mindless scientific rituals. Lastly, a conflation of expertise with eminence in practice creates an incentive structure that undermines the goal of self-correction in science. We suggest, instead, that we conceive an expert as a reliable informant. Following the extended virtue account of expertise, we propose a non-individualist and a performance-based model, and discuss why it does not suffer from the same problems as traditional approaches, and why it is more compatible with the reform movement's goal of creating a credible psychological science through self-correction.

Context specificity refers to the vexing phenomenon whereby a physician can see two patients with the same presenting complaint, identical history and physical examination findings, but due to specific situational (contextual) factors arrives at two different diagnostic labels. Context specificity remains incompletely understood and undoubtedly leads to unwanted variance in diagnostic outcomes. Previous empirical work has demonstrated that a variety of contextual factors impacts clinical reasoning. These findings, however, have largely focused on the individual clinician; here we broaden this work to reframe context specificity in relation to clinical reasoning by an internal medicine rounding team through the lens of Distributed Cognition (DCog). In this model, we see how meaning is distributed amongst the different members of a rounding team in a dynamic fashion that evolves over time. We describe four different ways in which context specificity plays out differently in team-based clinical care than for a single clinician. While we use examples from internal medicine, we believe that the concepts we present apply equally to other specialties and fields in health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to propose a framework for understanding the nature of how people construct problems by interacting with situations and subsequently to offer implications for instructional design and future research. We propose that people must interactively frame the components of a situation in order to establish the meaning of a problem to solve. Although this interactive meaning-making process is critical to real-world problem solving, little research has been devoted to understanding the nature of interactive problem-framing or how to support students in framing problems effectively. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to approach problem-framing from the perspective of cognitive theories focused on situated interactivity and propose a synthesized conceptual model based on the interaction of agents and context. We argue that solving a real-world problem involves a process of building it (the problem) by interactively shaping distributed situational resources into structures of meaning aimed towards the resolution of perceived contradictions. Using the key elements of the model, we also propose opportunities for future empirical research and possible implications for instructional design that can help facilitate the development of students' abilities to meaningfully frame problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using observational interviews and introducing theories of embodied and distributed cognition, this study examines the scholarly reading and the intellectual habits of a group of social scientists. All participants were working at universities in task environments dominated by digital artifacts and technologies. The study found a strong connection between scholarly reading and the scholars' writing processes and a further coupling to their digital publishing activity. While examining the participants' print and online reading, it turned out that their reading was so tightly coupled to their writing that this entanglement had to be at the core of the analysis. In the study, scholarly reading and writing are analyzed as cognitive processes that extend beyond the brain and body and comprise cognitive artifacts of texts and their material bearers, such as printouts, digital displays, computers, and the Internet. In the process of creating text--or reading and writing--brains, bodies, and artifacts are considered to be dynamically coupled in a distributed cognitive process. Based on interviews with a sample of academics, the study analyses how their scholarly reading relates to the other elements in such an extended process and how they utilize the affordances of cognitive digital artifacts in their creative and intellectual endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The tricky question in the plant cognition debate is what theory of cognition should be used to fix the reference of cognitive concepts without skewing the debate too much one way or the other. After all, plants are rather different to animals in many respects: they are not motile, do not possess central nervous systems or even neurons, do not exhibit an invariant morphology, interact with the world in a distributed multi-centred manner, and behave through changes in their physiology. Nonetheless, there is a significant strand in the debate that asserts that plants are indeed cognitive. But what theory of cognition makes sense of this claim without baking in prior zoological assumptions? The aim of this paper is to try out a theory of minimal cognition that makes the claim of plant cognition plausible. It is primarily inspired by the distributed cognition literature and the sensorimotor coordination theory of cognition proposed by van Duijn et al. (2006). We take a cognitive system to be a coordinated set of semi-autonomous processes running over the organism and items in its environment. Coordination is characterised in terms of two functional conditions that ensure that the system generates goal-directed action in the world. The system is stigmergic in the sense that the material results of its actions in the environment are a crucial part of the processes that coordinate further actions. The account possesses a degree of scale invariance and helps unify cognitive explanation across microorganisms, plants and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized by Michel Foucault, as a model for understanding the social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on the negative ramifications of Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and data consolidation with AI development, and positioning technologies themselves as the driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, and autonomy in the city. This paper describes an alternative diagram for Urban AI—the Polyopticon: a distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network of synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution technologies change the political, social, and psychodynamic relationships of sentience and witness in the city, shifting the effects of watching and watched beyond the exclusive domain of top-down surveillance and discipline. The Polyopticon poses a more expansive and ambivalent spectrum of possibilities for Urban AI scenarios, one that undermines the totalizing, singular, and cerebral notion of intelligence that so often characterizes Urban AI and smart city critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aimed at advancing the reform of the Paid Use of Residential Land, this study investigates the willingness to pay among farmers and its underlying factors. Based on a Logistic Regression analysis of a micro-survey of 450 pieces of data from the Sichuan Province in 2023, we evaluated the effects of three factors, namely individual, regional and cultural forces. Further, Random Forest analysis and SHAP value interpretation refined our insights into these effects. Firstly, the research reveals a significant willingness to pay, with 83.6% of sample farmers being ready to participate in the reform, and 53.1% of them preferring online payment (the funds are mostly expected to be used for village infrastructure improvements). Secondly, the study implies that Individual Force is the most impactful factor, followed by regional and cultural forces. Thirdly, the three factors show different effects on farmers’ willingness to pay from different income groups, i.e., villagers with poorer infrastructure and lower clarity of homestead policy systems tend to be against the reform, whereas farmers with strong urban identity and collective pride support it. Based on these findings, efforts should be made to increase the publicity of Paid Use of Residential Land. Moreover, we should clarify the reform policies, accelerate the development of the online payment platform, use the funds for village infrastructure improvements, and advocate for care-based fee measures for disadvantaged groups.

Cognitive interference is a classic cognitive phenomenon:processing one stimulus while ignoring another is morechallenging when the two are related. Recently, andsurprisingly, it has been shown that an individual’s cognitiveinterference can be removed by the people around them. In thepicture-word interference paradigm, participants respond to atarget picture and ignore distractor words. If the words aresemantically related to the target, interference slows responses.We found that this cognitive interference was removed, orsocially offloaded, when participants believed that they wereworking together with another person. In contrast to previousstudies we found it did not matter if the other person workedon the distractor words or on task irrelevant, coloured squares.Furthermore, the time course of this effect suggests that thesocial offloading of semantic interference is underpinned bylate inhibitory mechanisms rather than early distractor filtering.

The article presents the interdisciplinary approach of Edwin Hutchins, analyzing his conception of distributed cognition as probably the most important and lasting contribution of anthropology to the repertoire of theoretical tools in cognitive science. At the same time, this conception resulted in one of the most interesting relationships between cognitive science and social sciences. These relationships are made possible by the assumptions of Hutchins’ conception, which directly contribute to interdisciplinary collaboration. His account of distributed cognition has enormous potential, allowing the integration of research into cognitive and social processes. This is also because it breaks with methodological individualism.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the study of the problem of the production of historical knowledge in the digital age. The author believes that historical science, existing in the paradigm of «Digital Humanities», has acquired a new object of cognition – collective memory, abandoning the study of the past as a non-existent reality in favor of the study of ideas about it. In the multi-channel communication process, the formation of socio-epistemic arenas brings historical knowledge and historical memory together. Theoretical analysis. Socio-epistemic arenas are communication platforms for the production of historical knowledge developed by professional scientists, «smart crowds» and digital technologies in collective work formats. Participants in socio-epistemic arenas carry out distributed cognition, which is associated with the social context and collective memory, as it involves the inclusion of all previous experience of understanding historical reality in new interpretations of the past. Conclusion. The participation of the masses of Internet users in the study of History, who appropriate the results of collective research work, leads to the leveling of the boundaries between historical knowledge and historical memory. The principles of the rhetorical arenas of the communication space and civil science determine the structure of socio-epistemic arenas, the functioning of which is subordinated to the logic of the media.