Errors and Interaction
A cognitive ethnography of emergency medicine
Trasmundi combines her background as a cognitive ethnographer with theory of radical embodied cognition and interaction to investigate how healthcare practitioners manage cognitive events in patient treatment and diagnosing that often lead to human errors. This interdisciplinary focus emphasises how professional action underlines various forms of cognitive and social life that involves language, tools, organisational procedures, shared expertise, cultural values and social rules. The book investigates such phenomena which previously have fallen into the gaps between established disciplines of interaction analysis and psychology. In arguing that the multi-scalar constraints of professional action are still underexplored in a naturalistic setting of emergency medicine, Trasmundi uses tools such as multimodal interaction analysis and cognitive event analysis to investigate the cultural and distributed nature of cognition. The book provides the reader with a new take on this heavily investigated topic, both theoretically and methodologically by describing how medical culture affects real-time interaction and how culture itself is shaped by the exact same dynamics.