Cognition What is intelligence? What does thinking look like?

Luria and the Peasant, p What is going on here? Why is there a disconnect? What is Luria after? What does the peasant think Luria is after? What kind of sociocultural activity is the conversation? Rogoff, p. 247 How might one measure cognition or intelligence?

Views on Cognition Commonsense Intelligence looks the same everywhere; it can be tested. Intelligence is an individual capacity or ability, which can be used in all situations (“He’s smart”). Thinking occurs in an individual’s mind, perhaps in solitude. Cross-cultural psychology Intelligence is culturally defined; test performance reflects many other things besides intelligence. Thinking depends on the use of cultural tools (language, number systems, counters) created by many people and learned in sociocultural activities. As a result, intelligence may not be “general.” The performance of tasks “in the wild” shows that thinking is distributed across individuals and occurs in conjunction with interpersonal processes

In Rogoff’s formulation…. We learn to think through our participation in sociocultural activities (just as we learn other things), p One of the things we learn through participation in sociocultural activities is how to use cultural tools to think.

Thinking depends on cultural tools developed by other people through time and learned through participation in sociocultural activities from others Language, p. 264 Number system Methods for doing calculations (paper and pen, calculators, cellphones) Counters (digits)

Ed Hutchins Cognition in the Wild (1995)

In the wild, cognition is distributed across people and is generated collaboratively People do tasks together in mature and complex activities People may come to new ideas collaboratively The accomplishment of the task depends as much on social intelligence (timing, coordination, knowledge of personalities and the task) as on verbal or logico-mathematical reasoning (Rogoff, p. 270).

Implication #1 Because individual development constitutes and is constituted by social and cultural-historical activities and practices, it becomes difficult to separate out persons and activities. That is, is it the individual thinking or the tools or the context that is enabling the thinking? Hence, cognition as an individual, interpersonal, and community process.

Implication #2 School is a particular kind of sociocultural activity in which people learn to think in particular ways. American schools value certain kinds of intelligence over others: Linguistic and mathematical/logical Those capacities are considered generalizable. American schools aim to isolate individual thinking: Individual work No help from others on evaluations (considered cheating)

Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Frames of Mind (1983) Linguistic Logical-mathematical Musical Bodily-Kinesthetic Spatial Interpersonal Intrapersonal What kinds of intelligences are waitresses using? Are there some forms of intelligence that waitresses use that are not on this list?

Other definitions of intelligence Nzelu p. 250: wisdom, cleverness, and responsibility Does intelligence mean being fast or being slow and careful? p. 249