Is Distributed Cognition Group Level Cognition?

Abstract

This paper shows that recent arguments from group problem solving and task performance to emergent group level cognition that rest on the social parity and related principles are invalid or question begging. The paper shows that standard attributions of problem solving or task performance to groups require only multiple agents of the outcome, not a group agent over and above its members, whether or not any individual member of the group could have accomplished the task independently.

Keywords

• distributed cognition
• group cognition
• problem solving
• transactive memory systems
• joint action