Everyday Cognition (Schliemann et al. Handbook of CCP, 2nd ed., 1997) Ype H. Poortinga (Prof Em) Tilburg University, Netherlands & University of Leuven, Belgium

Some basics People can deal with problems in everyday life that they cannot solve in experimental settings Thinking is embedded in context; it is a social and cultural enterprise People draw on symbolic systems (linguistic, mathematical, religious) in actions and interpretations Everyday cognition extends beyond the field of individual (experiments, tests) psychology, including cultural anthropology and history NB One can be struck, like the authors, by cc differences, but also by the close resemblance between everyday cognition (especially in arithmetic) and forms of thinking taught in formal (western) education

From the lab to everyday cognition Three sources of the everyday cognition approach: - Experimenters questioning their methods and findings - Influences from the "sociohistorical" school (Vygotsky) - Piaget's approach to knowledge as a construction by an active subject (despite Piaget being a universalist with little time for context) Historically the experiment was devised to control unwanted sources of variance, disembedding process from context (e.g., Ebbinghaus used nonsense words) Bartlett studied the reconstruction that is part of memory and reflects the person's history This gradually led to concepts like, schema, script, and semantic representation, and a move away from context-invariant mechanisms Michael Cole has been most central in this

How to define context? Context is more than the object in the object-subject contrast E.g., - perception of an element varies with the Gestalt of which it is part - "grey" looks darker/whiter against a white/black background Hence, perception should be seen as an interaction process, and context as referring to the complex relations between person and setting The text (p. 185) mentions a much quoted example from Glick where a Kpelle subject describes a case of western classification as how dumb Kpelle would do this classification task (I, YHP, submit that is exceptional)

Overview of studies in everyday cognition Studies have been conducted with a large variety of tasks (e.g., reasoning, video games, memory). Illiterates obtain best results with contextualized materials, such as narratives for memory tasks rather than lists of words Well-known is research on syllogistic reasoning. Luria found that illiterate farmers in Central Asia could not logically solve syllogisms like: All bears on Nova Zembla, far up in the North, are white Last year, my cousin saw a bear on Nova Zembla What was the colour of the bear? After only a little formal schooling correct answers were given Luria (in line with Vygotsky) postulated a “faculty for abstract thinking” that can only be acquired by individuals if already present in their society Later Scribner showed with think-aloud protocols that answers always follow the rules of logic, given the premises of the respondents But respondents with no formal schooling tend to draw on own experience, rather than argue from the premises given by the tester

Everyday mathematics Kpelle make better estimates of the number of bowls of rice in a heap than USA students Brazilian cane cutters tend to compute a larger size for an irregularly shaped plot of land than the supervisors Vendors, builders or tailors almost never make the gross mistakes that are common in school learning (following "rule-bound" methods) In everyday context people everywhere use approximations, for example when shopping) Methods of traditional learning are on the job (in context), support is provided when needed (“scaffolding”). School learning is largely out of context Generalization or transfer is poor with learning on the job, though not much better with school learning

Everyday arithmetic is often limited to addition and subtraction E.g., the price of 10 oranges is computed by taking the known price of 3 oranges, adding this three times and then adding the price of a single orange In multiplication commutative properties often are problematic; the price of 100 oranges for 6 cents each requires a forbidding string of additions, it cannot be reformulated as an addition of 6 * 100 The development of formal mathematical knowledge has taken many generations; it requires some institutional setting that prevents this knowledge from getting lost In the conclusions section of the chapter the authors reiterate the idea that cognition goes beyond "cognitive abilities" of the individual as studied traditionally; there is scope for situated cognition, shared cognition, or distributed cognition