Category Archives: External cognition

Offloading and evolution

Posted on November 15, 2006 by

I just finished reading Carl Zimmer‘s very fine book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea; which is a great introduction to the topic and covers a lot of ground, from Darwin’s life aboard the Beagle to host-bacteria arms races (stop … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, External cognition, XCog | 2 Comments

Fun with representations VI – Sharing the load

Posted on November 7, 2006 by

In Cognition in the Wild, a book I’ll be coming back to later and often in this blog, Ed Hutchins expands on an observation by Herbert Simon, who said that the complicated movements and trajectories of an ant on the … Continue reading →

Posted in External cognition, XCog | 3 Comments

Ben Shneiderman on Creativity and Visualization

Posted on October 13, 2006 by

Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab and author of Leonardo’s Laptop, gave a talk at Ryerson University yesterday and at the University of Toronto today, on two different topics: At Ryerson he talked about … Continue reading →

Posted in External cognition, Information visualization | 2 Comments

Fun with representations V – Maps of the abstract world

Posted on October 4, 2006 by

Representing information means mapping it into a particular medium –focusing on certain elements of the original data, ignoring the irrelevant ones, and, ideally, simplifying the process of understanding and using it. Unfortunately, our resulting information ‘maps’ are sometimes inappropriate: they … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, External cognition, Software development, XCog | 10 Comments

Syntax is not sugar

Posted on September 20, 2006 by

Let’s say we’re representing some information visually with a standard directed graph. We have four nodes (B, C, D, and E) all pointing to another one (A). We have several choices to display the graph. Here are two: Are they … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, External cognition, Software development, XCog | 1 Comment

Fun with representations IV – Chaotic libraries

Posted on September 17, 2006 by

Alright, moving on with the representation series! This time I’ll start with an old puzzle that I, by coincidence, got from Steve Easterbrook and, separately, from Angelika Mader in Dagstuhl with a couple of weeks’ difference. We have an 8 … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, External cognition, XCog | 1 Comment

Fun with representations III – Hidden in plain sight

Posted on August 29, 2006 by

A while back, as part of a series of fascinating studies of perception in chess, Simon and Chase showed a chessboard to people with several degrees of chess expertise, for very brief moments, and asked them to reproduce the position … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, External cognition, XCog | 11 Comments

Fun with representations II – Where is the train going?

Posted on August 23, 2006 by

Continuing with the last post’s discussion, right now we’re in the business of finding out why are some representations better than others. As a warm-up, then, let’s try to figure out the following: Which of these representations of geographical data … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, External cognition, XCog | 4 Comments

Fun with representations I – Nine numbers

Posted on August 19, 2006 by

Here’s a two-player game for you to try out: You need nine cards, numbered 1 to 9. You and your opponent take turns picking cards -each card can only be picked once. The first player with three cards that add … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, External cognition, XCog | 6 Comments