Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doingJohn Seely Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Greeno, 1989 by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.Greeno & Moore, 1993
Situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead, knowing exists in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context.
History While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology in the late twentieth century,Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989 it shares many principles with older fields such as critical theory,McLaughlin, N. (1999). Origin myths in the social sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the emergence of critical theory. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 109-139.Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum, 356, 357-358. anthropology (Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger, 1991), philosophy (Martin Heidegger, 1968), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989), and sociolinguistics theories (Bakhtin, 1981) that rejected the notion of truly objective knowledge and the principles of Kantian empiricism.
Lucy Suchman's work on situated action at Xerox Labs was instrumental in popularizing the idea that an actor's understanding of how to perform work results from reflecting on interactions with the social and material (e.g. technology-mediated) situation in which she or he acts. More recent perspectives of situated cognition have focused on and draw from the concept of identity formationLave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. as people negotiate meaning through interactions within communities of practice.Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). Balancing act: How to capture knowledge without killing it. Harvard business review, 78(3), 73-80.Clancey, G. (2004). Local memory and worldly narrative: the remote city in America and Japan. Urban Studies, 41(12), 2335-2355. Situated cognition perspectives have been adopted in education,Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) instructional design,Young, 2004 online communities and artificial intelligence (see Brooks, Clancey). Grounded Cognition, concerned with the role of simulations and embodiment in cognition, encompasses Cognitive Linguistics, Situated Action, Simulation and Social Simulation theories. Research has contributed to the understanding of embodied language, memory, and the representation of knowledge.Barsalou, L. Grounded Cognition (2008) Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008. 59:617–45
Situated cognition draws a variety of perspectives, from an anthropological study of human behavior in the context of technology-mediated work, or within communities of practiceLave & Wenger, 1991 to the ecological psychology of the perception-action cycleJames J. Gibson, 1986 and intentional dynamics,Shaw, Kadar, Sim & Reppenger, 1992 and even research on robotics with work on autonomous agents at NASA and elsewhere (e.g., work by W. J. Clancey). Early attempts to define situated cognition focused on contrasting the emerging theory with information processing theories dominant in cognitive psychology.Bredo, 1994
Recently theorists have recognized a natural affinity between situated cognition, New Literacy Studies and new literacies research (Gee, 2010). This connection is made by understanding that situated cognition maintains that individuals learn through experiences. It could be stated that these experiences, and more importantly the mediators that affect attention during these experiences is affected by the tools, technologies and languages used by a socio-cultural group and the meanings given to these by the collective group. New literacies research examines the context and contingencies of language and tool use by individuals and how this changes as the Internet and other communication technologies affect literacy.Leu et al., 2009
Glossary Term Definitionaffordanceproperties of the environment, specified in the information array (flow field) of the individual, that present possibilities for action and are available for an agent to perceive directly and act uponattention and intentionOnce an intention (goal) is adopted, the agent's perception (attention) is attuned to the affordances of the environment.attunementattunement is a persisting state of awareness of the affordances in the environment and how they may be acted uponcommunity of practiceThe concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.detection of invariantsperception of what doesn't change across different situationsdirect perception (pick up)describes the way an agent in an environment senses affordances without the need for computation or symbolic representationeffectivitiesThe agent's ability to recognize and use affordances of the environment.embodimentas an explanation of cognition emphasizes first that the body exists as part of the world. In a dynamic process, perception and action occurring through and because of the body being in the world interact to allow for the processes of simulation and representation.legitimate peripheral participationthe initial stage(s) of a person's active membership in a community of practice to which he or she has access and the opportunity to become a full participant.perceiving and acting cycleGibson (1986) described a continuous perception-action cycle, which is dynamic and ongoing. Agents perceive and act with intentionality in the environment at all times.
Key principles Affordances/effectivities James J. Gibson introduced the idea of affordances as part of a relational account of perception.Gibson, 1977 Perception should not be considered solely as the encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind, but as an element of an individual's interaction with her environment (Gibson, 1977). Central to his proposal of an ecological psychology was the notion of affordances. Gibson proposed that in any interaction between an agent and the environment, inherent conditions or qualities of the environment allow the agent to perform certain actions with the environment.Greeno, 1994 He defined the term as properties in the environment that presented possibilities for action and were available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon.Gibson 1979/1986 Gibson focused on the affordances of physical objects, such as doorknobs and chairs, and suggested that these affordances were directly perceived by an individual instead of mediated by mental representations such as mental models. Gibson's notion of direct perception as an unmediated process of noticing, perceiving, and encoding specific attributes from the environment has long been challenged by proponents of a more category-based model of perception.
This focus on agent-situation interactions in ecological psychology was consistent with the situated cognition program of researchers such as James G. Greeno (1994, 1998), who appreciated Gibson's apparent rejection of the factoring assumptions underlying experimental psychology. The situated cognition perspective focused on "perception-action instead of memory and retrieval…A perceiving/acting agent is coupled with a developing/adapting environment and what matters is how the two interact".Young, Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997, p. 139 Greeno (1994) also suggested that affordances are "preconditions for activity," and that while they do not determine behavior, they increase the likelihood that a certain action or behavior will occur.
Shaw, Turvey, & Mace (as cited by Greeno, 1994) later introduced the term effectivities, the abilities of the agent that determined what the agent could do, and consequently, the interaction that could take place. Perception and action were co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which acted 'in the moment' together.Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young et al., 1997 Therefore, the agent directly perceived and interacted with the environment, determining what affordances could be picked up, based on his effectivities. This view is consistent with Norman's (1988) theory of "perceived affordances," which emphasizes the agent's perception of an object's utility as opposed to focusing on the object itself.
An interesting question is the relationship between affordances and mental representations as set forth in a more cognitivist perspective. While Greeno (1998) argues that attunements to affordances are superior to constructs such as schemata and mental models, Glenberg & Robertson (1999) suggested that affordances are the building blocks of mental models.
Perception (variance/invariance) The work of Gibson (1986) in the field of visual perception greatly influences situated cognition. Gibson argued that visual perception is not a matter of the eye translating inputs into symbolic representation in the brain. Instead the viewer perceives and picks up on the infinite amount of information available in the environment. Specifically, an agent perceives affordances by discovering the variants, what changes, and more importantly the invariants, what does not change across different situations. Given a specific intention (or intentional set), perceptions of invariants are co-determined by the agent and the affordances of the environment, and are then built upon over time.
Memory Situated cognition and ecological psychology perspectives emphasize perception and propose that memory plays a significantly diminished role in the learning process. Rather, focus is on the continuous tuning of perceptions and actions across situations based on the affordances of the environment and the interaction of the agent within that environment (Greeno, 1994). Representations are not stored and checked against past knowledge, but are created and interpreted in activity (Clancey, 1990).
Situated cognition understands memory as an interaction with the world, bounded by meaningful situations, that brings an agent toward a specified goal (intention). Thus, perception and action are co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which act 'in the moment' together.Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997 Therefore, the agent directly perceives and interacts with the environment, determining what affordances can be picked up, based on his effectivities, and does not simply recall stored symbolic representations.
Knowing Situativity theorists recast knowledge not as an entity, thing, or noun, but as knowing as an action or verb. It is not an entity which can be collected as in knowledge acquisition models. Instead knowing is reciprocally co-determined between the agent and environment.Barab & Roth, 2006 This reciprocal interaction can not be separated from the context and its cultural and historical constructions. Therefore, knowing isn't a matter of arriving at any single truth but instead it is a particular stance that emerges from the agent-environment interaction.