International Journal of Cognition and Technology - Current Issue

An accumulating body of research suggests that it is profitable to treat human cognition as a system that is primarily concerned with goal management. More specifically, it appears that the symbolic representation of goals, the location of relevant objects and operations and the construction of plans to achieve them, using objects and operations as components, are processes which are central to human cognition. The aim of the present paper is to suggest that relevance-based goal management processes are consistent with recent neuropsychological evidence that the human cognitive apparatus is duplex in nature. Furthermore, relevance information can provide a much-needed bridge between connectionist networks and the symbolic planning modules that characterise mature human cognition. The paper explores some phenomena, such as ethical reasoning, that have not been explained within previous theoretical frameworks. Finally, it is argued that, in addition to offering new explanations of familiar phenomena, the theoretical analysis of cognitive processes developed in the early part of the paper also suggests a range of novel technological interventions.

The human brain has a remarkable ability to generate plans for sequences of actions that allow human agents to co-operate with and to manipulate the behaviour of others. It is widely claimed that the operations underlying plan developments, behaviour sequencing and inhibition of inappropriate responses to the environment are carried out in the prefrontal cortex. This implies that the prefrontal cortex is a natural system with the capacity to utilise cognitive technology. The present paper argues that social competence is a manifestation of action planning in which other agents feature as plan elements. Accordingly, plans that involve other agents are expected to be more complex than plans which do not. In the light of evidence that negative information makes particularly heavy processing demands, social judgements involving prohibition or unacceptability are expected to create most difficulty for the human action planning system. These assumptions were tested by measuring the ability of patients with prefrontal injuries to detect anomalous action sequences, using a specially constructed Action Acceptability Test. It was hypothesised that if the frontal lobes play a major role in action planning, patients with frontal lobe injuries should show impaired ability to detect faulty action plans, particularly when such plans relate to complex social action sequences, and action sequences involving unacceptable behaviours. The hypotheses were generally supported as frontal-injury patients proved to be worse at detecting both complex social sequences and deviant action sequences than participants with non-frontal injuries and normal control participants. The results of the study are consistent with the view that human social competence results from the cognitive processes associated with action planning and the data also supports the claim that action planning processes are specifically disrupted by damage to the prefrontal cortex. The findings provide some confirmation for the Cognitive Technology perspective, in that action planning does seem to be physically associated with a specific brain area, and including social agents and deviations from acceptability in action plans do seem to be manipulations that operate to make action plans more difficult to process, hence causing more errors in individuals with damage to the prefrontal cortex. The results also provide some encouragement for the belief that new cognitive tools can be constructed that link brain processes to other levels of description, such as social behaviour. The Action Acceptability Test, a prognostic tool developed to predict the social competence of frontal-injury patients, is offered as one such example.

Recent developments in speech, network and embedded-computer technologies indicate that human–computer interfaces that use speech as one or the main mode of interaction will become increasingly prevalent. Such interfaces must move beyond simple voice commands to support a dialogue-based interface if they are to provide for common requirements such as description resolution, perceptual anchoring, and deixis. To support human–computer dialogue effectively, architectures must support active language understanding: that is, they must support the close integration of dialogue planning and execution with general task planning and execution.

Technological progress allows for the development of “intelligent” gadgets that are much smaller and more powerful than the bulky desktop computers that were around just a few years ago. Technology-oriented research communities understand these gadgets as enablers of scenarios that were widely considered science fiction just a few years ago: the expectation is that embedded and invisible technology calms our lives by removing the annoyances. Everyday life, however, is shaped by what people do, how they do it, and how they perceive what they are doing. The idea is that technology becomes context-aware in order to suit everyday life. So far, however, artifacts do not exhibit context-awareness beyond trivial notions of context. The question I address in this paper is to what extent artifacts can reasonably by expected to become context-aware. My impression is that the very idea of context-aware artifacts is closely related to much older ideas about intelligent machines pursued (with limited success) in the realm of classical artificial intelligence.

In this paper we examine collaborative fiction writing in a face-to-face setting and in a computer-mediated environment (online chat). To understand the role of social presence in online collaborative work, participants were placed either in a high collaboration task that involved working toward a common storyline or a low collaboration task that involved working toward individual storylines. For the high collaboration task, although face-to-face was perceived as more convenient than computer-mediated communication, this preference did not translate into any difference in terms of the number of idea units generated. For the low collaboration task, where teammates pursued independent storylines, computer-mediated communication was preferred over face-to-face communication. Despite this preference for computer-mediated communication over face-to-face communication in the low collaboration task, participants in the face-to-face condition generated more idea units than those in the computer-mediated condition. These findings are examined within the framework of interactivity and social presence.

The case study reported here models a Cognitive Tool (CT) for primary school children to learn common fraction addition/subtraction with unlike denominators. In the study, we developed a CT based on a cognitive task analysis of the domain. We then observed how 12 learners used this CT to understand fraction operations based on a knowledge of fraction equivalence. Results of the study indicate that the support offered by the CT aids learners with higher ability in mathematics to produce cognitive residues. The graphical partitioning model helps to link the concrete operations of partitioning with the abstract idea of a common denominator required for adding/subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. However, learners who have failed to develop the knowledge of fraction equivalence, which includes the concept of equivalence and the ways of finding it, cannot gain much from working with the CT. A model of affordances for improving the design of the CT to meet the diverse needs of learners is discussed.