Artefacts as Mediators of Distributed Social Cognition: A Case Study

Traditionally, cognition has been regarded as the outcome of internal cognitive processes manipulating mental representations. More recently, however, it has become clear that cognition cannot be separated from the social and material environment in which people live and act, and that in many cases cognition is distributed among individuals and environmental properties. One important aspect has turned out to be artefacts and their use, and there is growing interest in understanding how tool use affects cognition. However, even with this increased awareness of the role of artefacts, the focus has mainly been on the cognitive processes and representations of individuals, while the social role of artefacts has received less attention. An ethnographically inspired field study, observing a hospital’s children admission unit, was conducted to investigate the way individual and collaborative work are affected by the use of artefacts within a given social context. The results indicate that the use of artefacts is closely coupled to the social environment, that to some degree social interactions are transformed into more indirect, individual processes, and that artefacts are crucial for high-level processes such as memory and coordination.