Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

the box and could see the goal, then box-pushing behaviour was initiated. If it was
in contact with the box but could not see the goal, then other movements were triggered,
resulting in the robot finding contact with the box at a different position.
This subsumption architecture caused robots to seek the box, push it towards
the goal, and do so co-operatively by avoiding other robots. Furthermore, when
robot activities altered the environment, this produced corresponding changes in
behaviour of other robots. For instance, a robot pushing the box might lose sight
of the goal because of box movement, and it would therefore leave the box and use
its other exploratory behaviours to come back to the box and push it from a different
location. “Cooperation in some tasks is possible without direct communication”
(Kube & Bonabeau, 2000, p. 100). Importantly, the solution to the box-pushing
problem required such co-operation, because the box being manipulated was too
heavy to be moved by a small number of robots!
The box-pushing research of Kube and Bonabeau (2000) is an example of
stigmergic processing that occurs when two or more individuals collaborate on a
task using a shared environment. Hutchins (1995) brought attention to less obvious
examples of public cognition that exploit specialized environmental tools. Such
scaffolding devices cannot be dissociated from culture or history. For example,
Hutchins noted that navigation depends upon centuries-old mathematics of chart
projections, not to mention millennia-old number systems.
These observations caused Hutchins (1995) to propose an extension of Simon’s
(1969) parable of the ant. Hutchins argued that rather than watching an individual
ant on the beach, we should arrive at a beach after a storm and watch generations of
ants at work. As the ant colony matures, the ants will appear smarter, because their
behaviours are more efficient. But this is because,
the environment is not the same. Generations of ants have left their marks
on the beach, and now a dumb ant has been made to appear smart through
its simple interaction with the residua of the history of its ancestor’s actions.
(Hutchins, 1995, p. 169)
Hutchins’ (1995) suggestion mirrored concerns raised by Scribner’s studies of mind
in action. She observed that the diversity of problem solutions generated by dairy
workers, for example, was due in part to social scaffolding.
We need a greater understanding of the ways in which the institutional setting,
norms and values of the work group and, more broadly, cultural understandings
of labor contribute to the reorganization of work tasks in a given community.
(Scribner & Tobach, 1997, p. 373)
Furthermore, Scribner pointed out that the traditional methods used by classical
researchers to study cognition were not suited for increasing this kind of
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