Abstract
This chapter focuses on the nature of cognitive computations involved in collaborative tasks and its implication to design of information systems that facilitate massive online collaboration. When a group of people are collaborating either implicitly or explicitly, cognitive processes are distributed among individuals across these task components. The success of the individuals in accomplishing the task depends on whether the emergent outcomes of these distributed cognitive processes allow them to collectively achieve their goals, which also reflect the efficiency and effectiveness of how the distributed cognitive processes lead to collective intelligence. The goal of this chapter is to focus on the nature of cognitive computations in individuals and in groups. In particular, the chapter will focus on the central role of cognitive search in individual and group cognition and discuss how cognitive search may play a central role in collective intelligence by binding individual cognitive processes effectively. The chapter will then provide examples of information systems that support collective intelligence and argue from a theoretical standpoint the design principles that make these systems more efficient and capable of facilitating massive online collaboration.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that “symbols” are broadly defined as representations that relate to other entities. Although the focus is on processing of symbolic structures, it does not imply that this is the only kind of processing. There are other computations that, for example, implement the processing of symbols (e.g., in connectionist networks, in the chemical reactions of neurons, etc.), but this is not the level nor the kind of computation that the current analysis focuses on.
- 2.
Sometimes also called Noughts and Crosses; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe.
- 3.
Note that this is similar to the choice of cues based on their validities in decision heuristics like “take-the-best.”
- 4.
In the current context, it is more efficient relative to tools that do not provide any meaningful structures for explorative search, such as search engines.
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Fu, WT. (2016). From Distributed Cognition to Collective Intelligence: Supporting Cognitive Search to Facilitate Online Massive Collaboration. In: Cress, U., Moskaliuk, J., Jeong, H. (eds) Mass Collaboration and Education. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13536-6_7
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