CONCEPT
Cognitive Ecology
Hutchins's framework for the total web of mutual dependencies among cognitive elements — the insistence that cognition cannot be understood by examining agents in isolation from the environments that constitute their thinking.
Cognitive ecology is Hutchins's extension of distributed cognition to the analysis of cognitive phenomena within the web of mutual dependencies among elements of a cognitive ecosystem. The term is deliberately chosen: ecology, not environment. An environment is a container within which an organism operates. An ecology is a system of mutual dependencies in which organism and surroundings co-constitute each other. The navigation team does not merely operate within a cultural environment. It participates in a cultural ecology: the team's practices shape the cultural infrastructure — through the development of new procedures, the refinement of existing ones, the identification of situations current infrastructure does not adequately support — and the cultural infrastructure shapes the team's cognitive capacity through the tools, conventions, and knowledge structures it provides. Remove any layer of the ecology and the team's cognitive capacity degrades — not because individuals have become less competent but because the system within which competence operates has lost essential support.
