[1] According to Hutchins, cognition involves not only the brain but also external artifacts, work teams made up of several people, and cultural systems for interpreting reality (mythical, scientific, or otherwise).
Hutchins' distributed cognition theory explains mental processes by taking as the fundamental unit of analysis "a collection of individuals and artifacts and their relations to each other in a particular work practice".
[2] "DCog" is a specific approach to distributed cognition (distinct from other meanings)[3] which takes a computational perspective towards goal-based activity systems.
[2] Mental content is considered to be non-reducible to individual cognition and is more properly understood as off-loaded and extended into the environment, where information is also made available to other agents (Heylighen, Heath, & Overwalle, 2003).
It is often understood as an approach in specific opposition to earlier and still prevalent "brain in a vat" models which ignore "situatedness, embodiment and enaction" as key to any cognitive act (Ibid.).
[citation needed] In 1998, Mark Perry from Brunel University London explored the problems and the benefits brought by distributed cognition to "understanding the organisation of information within its contexts."
Later, John Sutton (2006)[9] defined five appropriate domains of investigation for research in Dcog: In ontogenesis, the first act of the mental representation distribution succeeds in the mother-child dyad that constitutes in the child the tools to think and perceive the world.
According to the hypothesis, the mother distributes the mental representation to the child to teach the young nervous system how to respond to environmental changes correctly.
[21][22] Due to this ecological learning, the child grasps the perception of objects and begins to cognize the environment at the simple reflexes stage of development without communication and abstract thinking.
Distributed cognition illustrates the process of interaction between people and technologies in order to determine how to best represent, store and provide access to digital resources and other artifacts.
It has been observed how medical actors use and connect gestural practices, along with visual and haptic structures of their own bodies and of artifacts such as technological instruments and computational devices.
With the new research that is emerging in this field, the overarching concept of distributed cognition enhances the understanding of interactions between individual human beings and artifacts such as technologies and machines, and complex external environments.
For example, it has been observed that the use of external manipulable materials such as cards and tokens can help improve performance and reduce cognitive bias such as the base-rate fallacy, even among adult problem-solvers, as long as they physically interact with these artefacts.
[32] In his book on USS Palau,[1] he explains in detail how distributed cognition is manifested through the interaction between crew members as they interpret, process, and transform information into various representational states in order to safely navigate the ship.
[33]The emphasis on finding and describing "knowledge structures" that are somewhere "inside" the individual encourages us to overlook the fact that human cognition is always situated in a complex sociocultural world and cannot be unaffected by it.