Social cognition, artefacts, and stigmergy: A comparative analysis of theoretical frameworks for the understanding of artefact-mediated collaborative activity

Collective behaviour is often characterised by the so-called ‘coordination paradox’: looking at individual ants, for example, they do not seem to cooperate or communicate explicitly, but nevertheless at the social level cooperative behaviour, such as nest building, emerges, apparently without any central coordination. In the case of social insects such emergent coordination has been explained by the theory of stigmergy, which describes how individuals can effect the behaviour of others (and their own) through artefacts, i.e., the product of their own activity (e.g., building material in the ants’ case). Artefacts clearly also play a strong role in human collective behaviour, which has been emphasised, for example, by proponents of activity theory and distributed cognition. However, the relation between theories of situated/social cognition and theories of social insect behaviour has so far received relatively little attention in the cognitive science literature. This paper aims to take a step in this direction by comparing three theoretical frameworks for the study of cognition in the context of agent–environment interaction (activity theory, situated action, and distributed cognition) to each other and to the theory of stigmergy as a possible minimal common ground. The comparison focuses on what each of the four theories has to say about the role/nature of (a) the agents involved in collective behaviour, (b) their environment, (c) the collective activities addressed, and (d) the role that artefacts play in the interaction between agents and their environments, and in particular in the coordination of cooperation.