Situating distributed cognition

We historically and conceptually situate distributed cognition by drawing attention to important similarities in assumptions and methods with those of American “functional psychology” as it emerged in contrast and complement to controlled laboratory study of the structural components and primitive “elements” of consciousness. Functional psychology foregrounded the adaptive features of cognitive processes in environments, and adopted as a unit of analysis the overall situation of organism and environment. A methodological implication of this emphasis was, to the extent possible, the study of cognitive and other processes in the natural (real world) contexts in which they occur. We therefore emphasize commonalities and differences between functional psychology and D-Cog. One purpose of the comparison is to consider the extent to which criticisms directed at functional psychology are relevant to D-Cog. We also examine the relation between functional psychology and philosophical pragmatism and conclude that D-Cog's conceptual framework would be strengthened through more explicit adoption of philosophical pragmatism, consistent with the eventual trajectory of functional psychology.     

Situating Time in the Leibnizian Hierarchy of Beings

Leibniz's widely influential account of time provides a significant puzzle for those seeking to locate this account within his hierarchical ontology. Leibniz follows his scholastic predecessors in supposing that there are different grades of being, with substances being the most real and all other things possessing their reality via their relationships to substance. Following this picture, Leibniz suggests that phenomenal bodies only possess the being that they derive from the substances (i.e., monads) that ground them. Some would argue that time likewise only possesses its being based on the bodies that it relates. Contrary to this suggestion (i.e., that time is twice removed from substances), I will argue that time is derived directly from rational souls. Thus, I will argue that time is on an ontological par with the phenomenal world of bodies.     

Situating maltreatment in the social context: Challenges for research

This article is a reply to Kagan’s (in press) commentary on our earlier article (Luke & Banerjee, 2013), which presented a meta-analysis and systematic review of research on the links between childhood maltreatment and social understanding. We address Kagan’s comments about the depiction of maltreatment as an isolated independent variable, and consider the specific obstacles faced by researchers in this area when seeking to understand the role played by social–contextual factors. We also consider how Kagan’s extension of our argument about heterogeneity in maltreated samples might usefully be applied to future research with this vulnerable group.     

Situating Ethical Behavior in the Nomological Network of Job Performance

Purpose

Our objective was to generate, define, and evaluate behavioral dimensions of ethical performance at work that are common across United States occupations.

Design/Methodology/Approach

This project involved three studies. Study 1 involved (a) qualitative review of published literature, professional codes of ethics, and critical incidents of (un)ethical performance and resulted in (b) behavioral dimensions and ethical performance rating scales. The second and third studies used a retranslation methodology to evaluate the ethical performance dimensions from Study 1. The behavioral dimensions were linked to the performance determinants (personal attributes) in Study 3.

Findings

Study 1 resulted in draft dimension definitions and rating scales for 10 ethical performance dimensions. In Studies 2 and 3, retranslation data provided strong support for 10 behavioral dimensions of ethical performance at work. Results from Study 3 shed light on possible relationships among the performance dimensions based on their underlying performance determinants.

Implications

Communicating an organization’s ethical standards to employees is important because some ethical breakdowns can be attributed to simply failing to recognize an ethical matter (in: DeCremer, Managerial ethics: Managing the psychology of morality, Routledge, New York, 2011). Definitions of ethical behavior in the workplace provide a tool for researchers, employers, and employees to communicate about ethical situations and a foundation for folding ethics into employee training and performance management.

Originality/Value

These studies provide a taxonomy of ethical performance at work that generalizes to a diverse array of occupations and industries, and dimensions and rating scales have value for performance management, training/curriculum development, job analysis, predictor development and/or validation, and additional research.

     

Active vision in passive locomotion: real‐world free viewing in infants and adults

Visual exploration in infants and adults has been studied using two very different paradigms: free viewing of flat screen displays in desk‐mounted eye‐tracking studies and real‐world visual guidance of action in head‐mounted eye‐tracking studies. To test whether classic findings from screen‐based studies generalize to real‐world visual exploration and to compare natural visual exploration in infants and adults, we tested observers in a new paradigm that combines critical aspects of both previous techniques: free viewing during real‐world visual exploration. Mothers and their 9‐month‐old infants wore head‐mounted eye trackers while mothers carried their infants in a forward‐facing infant carrier through a series of indoor hallways. Demands for visual guidance of action were minimal in mothers and absent for infants, so both engaged in free viewing while moving through the environment. Similar to screen‐based studies, during free viewing in the real world low‐level saliency was related to gaze direction. In contrast to screen‐based studies, only infants – not adults – were biased to look at people, participants of both ages did not show a classic center bias, and mothers and infants did not display high levels of inter‐observer consistency. Results indicate that several aspects of visual exploration of a flat screen display do not generalize to visual exploration in the real world.     

Situating Experience: Agency,Perception, and the Given

William Alston has been a long‐time critic of the arguments of Wilfrid Sellars, and he has recently revisited the arguments made by Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Alston's work attempts to show how Sellarsian views fail to account for our understanding of perception by making a two‐part attack on Sellars's account: part one of the attack takes up the Sellarsian approach to ‘looks’‐talk, and part two concerns Sellars's thoroughgoing conceptualism with regard to perception. In this article, I argue that there is much in Alston's view that does violence to our understanding of theoretical and practical reason by removing concepts (and thereby constraint by norms) from perception, and I show that Alston's two‐pronged attack fails due to its inadequate reading of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and its problematic underlying epistemology.     

Situating Moral Justification: Rethinking the Mission of Moral Epistemology

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology.     

Situating the self: understanding the effects of deep brain stimulation

The article proposes a theoretical model to account for changes in self due to Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). First, we argue that most existing models postulate a very narrow conception of self, and thus fail to capture the full range of potentially relevant DBS-induced changes. Second, building on previous work by Shaun Gallagher, we propose a modified ‘pattern-theory of self’, which provides a richer picture of the possible consequences of DBS treatment.     

Situating math word problems: The story matters

In two experiments, we explored how the situation model of a math story problem impacts math problem performance. Participants completed multiplication story problems in which a set of objects was associated with or dissociated from a protagonist, making them more or less accessible in memory during answer retrieval. On the basis of previous findings that the sum of two numbers interferes with retrieval of their product, the number of objects in the math problem was either highly interfering (“9” for 4 3 5) or less interfering (“8” for 4 3 5) for multiplication retrieval in the problem. Participants made more errors in problem solving when highly interfering numerical content was associated with the protagonist and, thus, foregrounded. Moreover, the lower one’s working memory, the bigger this effect. In sum, small changes in the situation model of a math story problem can harm performance. These changes shift the balance of factors that influence math performance away from math knowledge and toward individual differences in general cognitive capacity.     

Situating Emotions: From Embodied Cognition to Mindreading

In this article we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of mindreading versus embodied cognition approaches to emotion understanding. In the first part of the article we argue that mindreading explanations of how we understand the emotions of others (TT, ST or hybrid) face a version of the frame problem, i.e. the problem of how to limit the scope of the information that is relevant to mindreading. Also, we show that embodied cognition explanations are able to by-pass this problem because they provide a characterization of social understanding as being essentially situated. However, embodied cognition explanations seem to be limited in scope insofar as they do not target the more sophisticated forms of emotion understanding that have traditionally been the main focus of mindreading explanations. In the second part of the article we discuss Goldie’s account of emotion understanding as a possible way to complement embodied cognition approaches without re-introducing the frame problem. We offer two suggestions that might further the integration of Goldie’s account of emotion understanding within the framework of embodied cognition.     

Situating Standards in Practices: Multi Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment in India

Public health care needs to cope with a basic dilemma between providing standardized care within public programmes across entire and at times resource-constrained countries and adapting this care locally when responding to individual needs. This tension between standardization and local adaptation becomes particularly obvious for the prolonged and complicated treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Situated standardization, as introduced by Zuiderent-Jerak [2007a, 2007b] offers a way out of this dilemma. It helps to focus on how standards need to be situated in practice rather than viewing standardization and local adaptation as mutually exclusive practices. How do actors relate standardization and individual care in their practices of treating MDR-TB? Results from qualitative fieldwork at the first MDR-TB treatment sites of the Indian TB programme show that actors situate standards in a particular way. They assess the role of guidelines in a particular situation and on that basis recognize the core recommendations of guidelines or go beyond the guidelines. This allows actors to negotiate how standards should be situated and reconciles the dilemma between local adaptation and standardization. Having guidelines internalized, as is common for Indian TB control, bears both promises and pitfalls for engaging in standardization processes in a situated manner. The results contribute to science and technology study scholarship on guideline development. They highlight how actors coordinate the situating of standards and how this depends upon cultures of control. This illustrates the potential of qualitative studies on local adaptation for guideline developers by revealing existing practices of relating and negotiating local adaptation and standardization.     

Situating Coordination and Cooperation Between Ecological and Social Psychology

The major thrust of this analysis is to demonstrate the value of making ecological psychology more social while recognizing that for this to occur, social psychology must become more ecological in the sense that its key concepts must be treated in an embodied manner. I elaborate these propositions by focusing on establishing differences between coordination and cooperation. I then explore a range of relationships between them from a social psychological perspective. To accomplish this integration, which uses the commitment to reciprocity as a joint organizing principle, I use three complementary models—dynamical systems, effectivities-affordances, and a role-rule model of social commitment. Key aspects of the analysis involve (1) elaborating the meaning of Turvey's (1990) Turvey, M. T. 1990. Coordination. American Psychologist, 45: 938–954. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] proper-relations view of coordination and (2) demonstrating the particular relevance of roles and trust as unifying concepts. From this perspective, coordinations occur between roles, rather than individuals, at the level of team play. Team play, in turn, is shown to depend on trust. And trust, in turn, is related to perceptions of dependability, thereby illustrating a critical intersection of ecological and social psychology.     

Central vision in the newborn

Newborns' fixations on a 4° dot were longer than their fixations on the comparable part of a blank field. This suggests newborns can detect a stimulus with the fovea or with some part of the retina near the fovea.     

Situating Culturally Embodied Play Ecologies of Preschool Children: Lost in Transition

This article contributes as a commentary to Min’s critical evaluation of the challenges and resistances that have presented themselves during the recent process of changing the pedagogical practices ofChinese preschools to more closely resemble those seen in Scandinavian. The focus is on how decisions of how to structure the particular environment in preschool settings have direct and indirect implications for children’s learning and learning possibilities, and the importance of understanding these as mediated signifiers of the particular culture values. The discussions stress the importance of weighing cross-cultural pedagogical practices in terms of the functions they each serve in themselves, and in regard to the sociocultural history from which they have emerged and serve within. This means enculturation of new didactic practices should be understood as a gradual, smooth processes that allows itself to merge useful aspects of new educational models and practices with existing practices and cultural values.