As envisioned by James Gibson, an ecological approach to cognition takes a starting point in the reciprocity of an organism and its environment. If one adds to Gibson’s vision the idea that this reciprocity constitutes an organism-environment system, then we have a self-organised cognitive system, animated by the organism and incorporating various structures in the environment. The dynamics of such systems constitute a cognitive trajectory (i.e. the path traversed by the system), and give rise to cognitive events (i.e. significant changes – phase transitions – along the cognitive trajectory). In other words, the specific configuration of cognitive events creates a unique, irreproducible cognitive trajectory, constituted by the fine-grained particulars of human behaviour. Building on this ecological framework, the talk present a qualitative method for analyzing such cognitive events: Cognitive Event Analysis (CEA).The talk outlines the theoretical framework that underlies CEA, presents the methodological principles, and demonstrates the method on both experimental and naturalistic data.

References on Cognitive Event Analysis:

Cowley, S. J., & Nash, L. (2013). Language, interactivity and solution probing: Repetition without repetition. Adaptive Behavior, 21, 187-198. DOI: 10.1177/1059712313482804

Pedersen, S. B. (2015). The cognitive ecology of human errors in emergency medicine: an interactivity-based approach. (Ph.D.), University of Southern Denmark, Odense.  

Pedersen, S. B., & Steffensen, S. V. (2014). Temporal Dynamics in Medical Visual Systems. Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 21(1-2), 143-157.

Steffensen, S. V. (2013). Human interactivity: Problem-solving, solution-probing and verbal patterns in the wild. In S. J. Cowley & F. Vallée-Tourangeau (Eds.), Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice (pp. 195-221). Dordrecht: Springer.

Steffensen, S. V. (In press/2015). Cognitive Probatonics: towards an ecological psychology of cognitive particulars. New Ideas in Psychology, 1-10.

Steffensen, S. V., & Pedersen, S. B. (2014). Temporal Dynamics in Human Interaction. Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 21(1-2), 80-97.

Steffensen, S. V., Vallée-Tourangeau, F., & Vallée-Tourangeau, G. (In press/2015). Cognitive Events in a Problem-solving Task: A Qualitative Method for Investigating Interactivity in the 17 Animals Problem. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1-25.

Vallée-Tourangeau, F., Steffensen, S. V., Vallée-Tourangeau, G., & Makri, A. (2015). Insight and cognitive ecosystems. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX.