Transcript
Page 1: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Cognition

What is intelligence?What does thinking look like?

Page 2: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Luria and the Peasant, p. 39-40• What is going on here? Why is there a disconnect?• What is Luria after?• What does the peasant think Luria is after? • What kind of sociocultural activity is the conversation?• Rogoff, p. 247

• How might one measure cognition or intelligence?

Page 3: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Views on Cognition

Commonsense• Intelligence looks the same

everywhere; it can be tested.

• Intelligence is an individual capacity or ability, which can be used in all situations (“He’s smart”).

• Thinking occurs in an individual’s mind, perhaps in solitude.

Cross-cultural psychology• Intelligence is culturally defined;

test performance reflects many other things besides intelligence.

• Thinking depends on the use of cultural tools (language, number systems, counters) created by many people and learned in sociocultural activities. As a result, intelligence may not be “general.”

• The performance of tasks “in the wild” shows that thinking is distributed across individuals and occurs in conjunction with interpersonal processes

Page 4: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

In Rogoff’s formulation….

• We learn to think through our participation in sociocultural activities (just as we learn other things), p. 237.

• One of the things we learn through participation in sociocultural activities is how to use cultural tools to think.

Page 5: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Thinking depends on cultural tools developed by other people through time

and learned through participation in sociocultural activities from others

• Language, p. 264• Number system• Methods for doing calculations (paper and

pen, calculators, cellphones)• Counters (digits)

Page 6: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?
Page 7: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Ed Hutchins Cognition in the Wild (1995)

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In the wild, cognition is distributed across people and is generated

collaboratively• People do tasks together in mature and

complex activities• People may come to new ideas collaboratively• The accomplishment of the task depends as

much on social intelligence (timing, coordination, knowledge of personalities and the task) as on verbal or logico-mathematical reasoning (Rogoff, p. 270).

Page 9: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Implication #1

Because individual development constitutes and is constituted by social and cultural-historical activities and practices, it becomes difficult to separate out persons and activities.

That is, is it the individual thinking or the tools or the context that is enabling the thinking?

Hence, cognition as an individual, interpersonal, and community process.

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Implication #2

School is a particular kind of sociocultural activity in which people learn to think in particular ways.

American schools value certain kinds of intelligence over others:• Linguistic and mathematical/logical• Those capacities are considered generalizable.American schools aim to isolate individual thinking:• Individual work• No help from others on evaluations (considered cheating)

Page 11: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Frames of Mind (1983)

• Linguistic• Logical-mathematical• Musical• Bodily-Kinesthetic• Spatial• Interpersonal• Intrapersonal

• What kinds of intelligences are waitresses using?

• Are there some forms of intelligence that waitresses use that are not on this list?

Page 12: Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Other definitions of intelligence

• Nzelu p. 250: wisdom, cleverness, and responsibility

• Does intelligence mean being fast or being slow and careful? p. 249


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