Group cognition

Concepts

Group cognition is an analytic viewpoint that looks beyond individual cognition to include the interaction of individuals with other people, with artifacts and with cultural resources as producing cognitive products through their interaction. Accordingly, cognition or thinking can be analyzed in a number of ways:

• An individual thinks and speaks. The thought takes place in the individual’s mind (inside the head) and can be expressed in the (external) world through speech, gesture, writing, artifacts. This has been a traditional cognition view since Descartes.
• A small group of people collaborates, usually through spoken or written communication, and produces utterances or other products that cannot be attributed to any one of the group members by themselves. The individuals may build on each other’s ideas (transaction). Also, there may be group processes or features of the group interaction, which themselves contribute to the small-group cognition.
• One or more people may interact with various kinds of artifacts, such as software applications or software agents, resulting in extended cognition.
• One or more people may interact within a social setting, such as a culture or a socio-technical system, resulting in social cognition or situated learning.
• Larger groups of people, artifacts and cultural settings (activity systems) may interact, resulting in collective intelligence or distributed cognition.