Introduction to Cognition in Science and Technology

Michael E. Gorman
Department of Science, Technology and Society, University of Virginia
Received 13 March 2009; received in revised form 16 April 2009; accepted 11 May 2009
Abstract
Cognitive studies of science and technology have had a long history of largely independent
research projects that have appeared in multiple outlets, but rarely together. The emergence of a new
International Society for Psychology of Science and Technology suggests that this is a good time to
put some of the latest work in this area into topiCS in a way that will both acquaint readers with the
cutting edge in this domain and also give them a hint of its history. One core theme includes how sci-
entists, inventors, and engineers represent and solve problems; another, related theme is the extent to
which they distribute and share cognition. Methodologies include ne-grained studies of historical
records, protocols of working scientists, observations and comparisons of engineering science labora-
tories, and computational simulations designed both to serve as research tools and also to improve
scientic problem-solving. The series of articles will conclude with the Associate Editors sugges-
tions for future research.
Keywords: Distributed cognition; Shared cognition; Science; Technology; Engineering; Computa-
tional simulations
There are rovers on the surface of Mars that are gathering data about the presence of
water. What kind of thinking led to the development of these devices and the data they col-
lect? A biomedical laboratory is trying to develop replacement, living blood vessels for
treating arteriosclerosis. How is cognition shared and distributed among people and devices
in this laboratory?
Papers in this issue of topiCS
1
will look at these and other issues on the cutting edge of
cognition and science. Science and technology are the means by which the human species
has investigated our own evolution and the origins of the universe, and also created both the
means to cover the planet with our species and provide weapons that could destroy most
Correspondence should be sent to Michael E. Gorman, STS, SEAS, Department of Science, Technology and
Society, 351 MC Cormick Road, p.o. Box 400744, Thornton Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4744
Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 675685
Copyright 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 1756-8757 print / 1756-8765 online
DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01034.x
(if not all) of us. Scientic and technological thinking should therefore be a topic of great
interest to all human beingsespecially cognitive scientists.
The history of attempts to apply cognitive science to scientic and technological thinking
includes a classic volume of selections edited by Tweney (Tweney, Doherty, & Mynatt,
1981) and volumes of papers edited by Giere (1992) and Shrager (Shrager & Langley,
1990).
The work in this issue certainly has roots in these classic studies, but it represents
substantial new material, methodologically and conceptually. The volume grew out of
a paper session at the Nashville meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in August
2007 on When Social and Cognitive Perspectives Blur: The Case of Developing
Expertise in Science and Engineering; hence, the papers are weighted toward the
participants in that session, although the editor of this issue has made an effort to
include otherssome of whom, regrettably, were unable to meet the deadline for this
and the following issue.
In this introduction, I will attempt to put this issue in context with other important work
in cognition and science by using a methodological framework developed by Kevin Dunbar
(Dunbar & Fugelsang, 2005) and amplied in a recent volume of papers on scientic and
technological thinking (Gorman et al., 2005). Dunbars framework is based on an analogy
with biological research. Where the analogy does not t the domain of scientic and techno-
logical thinking, I have added additional categories.
1. In vitro
In vitro studies in cognitive science correspond to laboratory tasks performed with non-
scientists (who can be children or adults) as participants. A classic example is Wasons
2,4,6 task and analogous problems (Gorman, 1992; Wason, 1960). Participants in Wasons
original experiment were given the numbers 2, 4, 6 as an example of a rule the experimenter
had in mind and were asked to propose additional number triples to determine the rule.
Participants tended to exhibit a conrmation biasthey would propose triples that t their
initial notion of the rule, for example, 6, 8, 10 and 10, 12, 14. They did not falsify rules like
numbers go up by twos by trying additional triples like 1, 2, 3. Wasons original rule
was ascending numbers.
Wason was not trying to study cognition in science. He was interested in reasoning. But
the kind of reasoning he was studying is relevant to science. Each triple is an experiment
that allows participants to develop and test hypotheses.
In vitro problems allow control of a wide range of variables, including the type of task, the
rule, and the instructions given. Consider instructions, for example. Participants can be told
specically to try not only to propose experiments that t their hypothesis but also ones that
do not, which makes it easy for most to guess and test rules like Wasons (Gorman, 1992).
But the 2, 4, 6 task has low ecological validity. The participants are not scientists, the task
is simple and unambiguous, there are no grants, careers, or awards hinging on the outcome,
etc.
676 Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009)
1.1. Ecological validity of in vivo tasks can be increased
Experimental simulations of science can be made more realistic. For example, Mynatt,
Doherty, and Tweney (1978) developed an articial universe in which participants had to
conduct experiments to determine the laws governing the motions of particles; they found
that conrmation was actually a very useful heuristic in this complex environment. Scien-
tic reasoning tasks can be modied to incorporate the possibility of error (Gorman, 1989);
conrmation is also a useful heuristic for detecting these errors. Shrager, Klahr, and others
asked children and adults to program a device called the Big Trak and observed that the
most effective participants searched and coordinated hypothesis and experiment spaces
(Klahr, 2000; Shrager & Klahr, 1986). One way to make these tasks even more realistic is to
use actual scientists as participants.
2. Ex vivo
This approach involves taking scientists out of their (in vivo) working environments and
testing them on in vitro problems. Typically, these problems are not the articial tasks used
by Wason, Gorman, Tweney, Shrager, and othersalthough Michael J. Mahoney compared
scientists with Protestant ministers on the 2,4,6 task and found the former more likely to
show conrmation bias than the latter (Mahoney, 1976)!
2
The typical ex vivo problems involve a certain amount of domain knowledge, and they
resemble the sorts of word problems encountered by students. Indeed, the early ex vivo stud-
ies compared novices, usually students, with experts in areas like physics (Chi, 2006). One
of the general conclusions was that novices tend to rely on a variety of general heuristics for
solving textbook-style problems, including working backward from the goal. Experts, by
contrast, quickly classify a problem in a way that suggests what procedures and information
are necessary to solve it.
The article by Clement in this issue is a particularly sophisticated example of the ex vivo
approach. He picked professors and advanced graduate students from physics, mathematics,
and computer science. His problem sounds simple enough: Would doubling the diameter of
the coils in a spring cause it to stretch more or less, given a constant weight? Clement asked
his participants to think aloud as they worked. He found that they relied heavily on thought
experiments, which he denes as using a mental model to make a prediction about an
untested aspect of a system. Clement compares his participants methods to analyses of his-
torical thought experiments by scholars like Nersessian and Gooding (who have papers in
this volume). Clements research therefore focuses on a comparison between an ex vivo
study of current scientists and mathematicians and inferences made from studies of histori-
cal gures like Galileo.
Clements paper illustrates several of the themes that characterize the research reported
in this issue. There is a heavy focus on visualization in science and technology and also on
the kinesthetic element: Clement discusses perceptual-motor schema. The goal is a solid
qualitative understanding of the problem-solving processes couched in language that can be
Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 677
used for comparison with other types of studies. In the past, there was an almost dogmatic
insistence that any such analyses had to be translated into a computational simulation
(Gorman, 1992), but Clement is not alone among the authors here in putting off formal mod-
eling until the phenomenon is better understood.
3. In vivo
The next obvious step toward ecological validity is to observe scientists and or
engineers in vivo, working on genuine problems that arose in the course of their
work. Several of the authors in this volume have taken this approach, which is a sig-
nicant change from the heyday of purely experimental methods. Here one exchanges
control for validity.
In vivo studies of individual scientists can be done by observation combined with think-
aloud protocols. An example is the study by Trickett, Trafton, and Schunn in this volume,
who compared the way theoretical and applied scientists dealt with anomalous results. Their
sample included two astronomers and one expert in computational uid dynamics, which
they considered theoretical scientists, and ve meteorologists, which they considered
applied scientists. All were videotaped as they worked, and were asked to think aloud. These
protocol statements are coded, so that there is inter-rater agreement on categories like what
constitutes an anomalous result. In addition to statistical comparisons of results from the
coding categories, in vivo studies should include examples of the cognitive processes used,
and in some cases, graphical representations of the thinking processes of an individual
scientist worked over time (we will discuss these graphical representations later in the
Subspecies Historiae section). Trickett et al.s conclusion that theoretical scientists used
more conceptual simulations than applied after an anomaly has a high ecological validity,
but in the uncontrolled in vivo setting, it is possible that the perceived differences are due
to some other factor, for example, the nature of the very different tasks. That is why in vivo
studies have to describe the problem-solving context in detail, and why it is important to
nd ways of making the data available to other researchers who might want to try another
coding scheme.
3.1. In vivo studies of laboratories
Science and engineering are social activities, with much of the important problem-
solving and strategizing occurring in teams. One advantage of studying laboratories and
other team activities is that participants talk aloud to each other, without prompting from
an experimenter. However, they do not always provide the same level of details on their
problem-solving process as they do in a think-aloud protocol when working alone. In a
laboratory setting, there is a great deal of tacit knowledge that does not need to be artic-
ulated among team members. So the ideal method would include both individual proto-
cols and analyses of group processes, as investigators go between individual and team
situations.
678 Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009)
Kevin Dunbar did a now-classic study of three molecular biology laboratories in the
United States (Dunbar & Fugelsang, 2005). He interviewed scientists, attended talks, read
relevant materials, and taped and coded laboratory meetings. One of the issues he looked at
was similar to the focus of Trickett et al.s studies: how scientists deal with anomalous
results. About half of the results obtained by Dunbars molecular biology laboratories were
unexpected. The rst strategy the scientists used was to classify most of the anomalies as
methodological errors. When the anomalies persisted, scientists shifted to offering theoreti-
cal explanations. Members of the laboratory often proposed different models or hypotheses
to account for the anomalies. Often, they searched for common features of anomalies and
tried to propose a general model that would account for all of them. Dunbar checked his in
vivo results with an in vitro study, in which individual participants were protocoled on a sci-
entic reasoning simulation. Like the scientists, the experimental participants spent more
time reasoning about unexpected data and tried to look for common mechanisms of actions
that would explain them.
One take-away from Dunbars research is the importance of trying to triangulate multiple
methodological approaches to issues like the role of anomalies in scientic reasoning.
Nersessians article in this issue is an in vivo study of two biomedical research laborato-
ries, one working on tissue engineering and the other on neural engineering. While Dunbar
focused on laboratory meetings, Nersessian and her colleagues adopted the methods of cog-
nitive anthropology and became participant-observers of the ongoing research, developing a
coding scheme gradually and then implementing it as they made further observations. They
also studied the texts generated by the researchers.
One major phenomenon they investigated parallels a theme of this introduction: how
researchers combined in vitro and in vivo approaches. In biology and psychology, exper-
iments are limited by ethics: There are a wide range of medical and psychological proce-
dures that are completely off limits for human beings; the constraints on animal research
are less, but still very stringent, and in all cases the research has to pass through an
extremely stringent review. All of these restrictions are commendable, but this means
that many questions that could be answered by in vitro research involve studies that are
off limits.
The biomedical engineering scientists in Nersessians research solved this problem
by constructing model systems, often a hybrid of computational models and physical
devices. These models created spaces where the lines between science and engineering
blur; as Galison and many others have pointed out, instrumentation has always
played a critical role in scientic thinking, and the scientists themselves have
been involved in creating the technologies they use to observe and manipulate nature
(Galison, 1999).
4. Subspecies historiae
This approach involves cognitive analysis of historical casestudies. In terms of the
in vitro in vivo analogy, this research corresponds to paleontology. Episodic memory is
Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 679
reconstructive, so the cognitive scientist has to beware of scientists and inventors recollec-
tions later in lifeit is best to have records akin to those that would have been obtained
from a protocol or real-time transcript. Therefore, cognitive historical analysis requires
detailed notebooks, drafts of publications, letters and, where possible, tape recordings and
interviews. Like the paleontologist, the cognitive historian is often confronted with an
incomplete and or distorted fossil record from which to make inferences.
4.1. The invention of the telephone
Let me take the liberty of using my comparative study of three telephone inventors as an
example of the advantages and difculties of this method. I collaborated with a historian of
technology, W. Bernard Carlson, who knew where the best possible archival information
was located and how to access it, and also who the relevant experts were (Gorman & Carl-
son, 1990). He and I not only read letters, notebooks, patent applications, and secondary
sources, we also went to museums where artifacts were stored and inspected them.
Our goal was to compare three inventors: Alexander Graham Bell, usually considered the
inventor of the telephone; Bells closest rival Elisha Gray; and Thomas Edison, who was
brought in by Western Union to design around Bells telephone patents.
3
Here the problem
of records became paramount. Bell did the best job of documenting his invention pro-
cesshe wrote letters to his mother and father detailing signicant accomplishments and
kept a notebook from just before he obtained his rst telephone patent through his successful
transmission of speech. In court, Bell was an eloquent witness who told a convincing inven-
tion story. Elisha Gray, by contrast, did not keep a notebookwe had to rely on his patent
applications, his memory for events in court, and his later reconstructions. In addition to pat-
ent applications, Edisons invention records consisted of hundreds of sketches, often several
scribbled on the same piece of paper, without accompanying explanations.
To gure out how to do the cognitive analysis, I took the case with the best records. It
turned out also to be the simplest case. Bell admitted early on that he would have to be a the-
oretical inventor because his hands-on skills and resources were limited. Bell followed a
VOTAT strategy in his experimentsvary one thing at a time. Edison, by contrast, was run-
ning the rst independent R&D laboratory at Menlo Park and could have assistants to help
him try multiple variations.
To analyze Bells notebook, I followed in the footsteps of Ryan Tweney, who constructed
problembehavior graphs of Michael Faradays discovery processes (Tweney, 1989). Fara-
day kept the most detailed notebooks of any scientist or inventor. Even so, David Gooding
felt he had to rebuild some of Faradays devices in order to better understand gaps in the
notebook (Gooding, 1990).
The problem behavior graphs helped me make two discoveries regarding Bells pro-
cesses (Gorman, 1995). The distinguished historian Robert Bruce had called a sequence
of experiments Bell conducted on March 8, 1876 random (Bruce, 1973). By March
10, Bell and Watson had transmitted speech, using an apparatus that looked very differ-
ent from the one Bell used on March 8, so it is easy to see why the experiments
seemed almost disconnected. But in fact what Bell did on March 8 was to replicate a
680 Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009)
design he had used frequently for multiple telegraphy, to make certain it worked before
he introduced signicant variations. While the March 8 problem behavior graph
improved on Bruces account, my graphs for March 9 and 10 conrmed one of his
major contentions. Bells successful speaking telegraph looked a lot like one Gray had
sketched in a preliminary patent application, leading to accusations that Bell must have
stolen the design from Gray (Gorman, Mehalik, Carlson, & Oblon, 1993). But Bruce
noted that the two devices in fact were viewed by the inventors themselves as function-
ing differently, a fact which was conrmed by the experiments Bell conducted on
March 9 and 10.
To make a long story short, both Bell and Gray stuck needles on a diaphragm and dipped
them into water that had another contact at the bottom to complete a circuit. When someone
spoke against the diaphragm, the needle would vibrate in the water, varying the resistance
in the circuitperhaps enough to transmit speech. Grays design depended on the depth of
the needle in the water. Bells depended on the relationship between the relative sizes of the
contact hanging from the membrane and the one at the bottom of the water. Bell compared
sticking a bell in the water to having the point of a needle barely touching the surface, and
he concluded that the latter arrangement produced a better effect. Therefore, he drew the
opposite conclusion from Gray about the benets of immersing the contact attached to the
diaphragm deeply in the water.
Bell and Gray produced devices that appeared similar but operated from fundamentally
different mental models. This was made clear to me by a sketch I discovered in the
Library of Congress, from Bells notebook. I say discovered because it had been seen by
researchers like Bruce before, but no one had grasped its signicance. It shows the bones of
the ear attached to a diaphragm and a speaking tube, vibrating close to two different
arrangements of electromagnets. Over this crude sketch, Bell announced his approach: that
he would follow the analogy of nature by using the ear as a model for the telephone, which
meant that he would need an armature that would function like the bones of the ear, translat-
ing the vibrations of the diaphragm into a current that precisely mimicked the form of the
sound wave (see http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/albell/emm.2.html for Bells original sketch).
Grays mental model for a speaking telegraph was a device called the lovers tele-
graph, the old two tin cans connected by a string most of us build in childhood. Gray at
one point briey considered that the ear might be a useful analogy for the speaking tele-
graph, but he did not have Bells detailed knowledge of the workings of the ear. Bell in fact
had built a device that used the bones of the middle ear to trace sound waves, so his mental
model was based on hands-on expertise.
The strength and weakness of Bells mental model are immediately apparent. The
ear is a great receiver for sound waves, but not a transmitter. Other inventors like
Edison realized that Bell had solved the problem of receiving sound waves, but that his
transmitter was far from optimal. Edison, in particular, developed a greatly improved
transmitter.
My analysis of Bell highlighted the utility of cognitive methods like problembehavior
graphs and concepts like mental models for analyzing and comparing historical records of
inventors. But the comparison part was hindered by the fact that the Edison and Gray
Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 681
records did not include the kind of detail that was available for Bell. Edisons records were
detailed, but mainly visual, and hard to interpret without a real-time protocol. Grays were
enough to infer his mental model, but not sufcient to construct more than a partial graph of
his invention process.
Tweneys contribution to this issue picks up on the comparative historical theme. He con-
trasts Faraday and Maxwell, the latter mathematized the formers eld theory. Maxwell
referred to Faraday as an intuitive mathematician. Tweneys main point is that Faraday
and Maxwell relied on similar mental models, but whereas Faraday represented them visu-
ally and tactually, Maxwell represented them mathematicallyusing a mathematical style
that was peculiar to Cambridge Wranglers.
Tweney, in this paper, is developing theory from subspecies historiae research done
on Faraday and Maxwell by himself and a long list of other scholars. His conclusions
arise out of intimate knowledge of the notebooks and treatises of Faraday and Max-
well.
Gooding synthesizes data from multiple historical analyses to create an iterative model of
how scientists go from two-dimensional images to marked sketches or plots, then structural
models, and nally process models. For example, Gooding describes how Bragg took a pho-
tograph of an X-ray diffraction pattern, marked it to indicate magnitude of each impact,
drew the probable paths of electrons that would create such a pattern, then built an apparatus
that veried diffraction patterns could be created in accordance with his process model.
Gooding provides another example from paleontology, involving the reconstruction of a
three-dimensional model of an organism from the photograph of a fossil imprint.
Gooding emphasizes the hybrid multimodal, plastic nature of scientic images; therefore,
his model is itself the kind of process inference he is studying, using multiple historical
cases as data. Much of the inference process is tacit, in part because it is based on human
neurological capabilities, but in part because it also reects the tacit communication norms
of a communitynorms that can be made explicit over time. Gooding uses these insights to
make the case that visual inference is distributed cognition: There is no distinction between
subjective and collective.
5. In silico
Computational simulations, which Dunbar refers to as in silico, are another important
method for exploring scientic thinking. The late great Herbert Simon was a leading advo-
cate of programs that he felt could discover, and he facilitated an active research program in
this area (Langley, Simon, Bradshaw, & Zykow, 1987). Paul Thagard developed a connec-
tionist program (ECHO) that demonstrated explanatory coherence could account for the
gradual acceptance of a scientic theory over its rivals, for example, how the asteroid theory
of the dinosaurs triumphed (Thagard, 1988, 1989).
The problem with these early programs was a lack of ecological validity. The most inter-
esting programs sought to get around this problem by emulating closely the thinking pro-
cesses that led to a particular discovery, for example, Krebs of the ornithine cycle
682 Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009)
(Kulkarni & Simon, 1988). But even the programs that tried to follow a scientists path were
not embodied, so could not emulate the hands-on and perceptual aspects of science, and they
were not embedded in the kinds of social networks that decide what counts as a major dis-
covery deserving of awards like the Nobel (Shrager & Langley, 1990).
Instead of modeling a complete discovery, computational simulations can model
processes that are often (but not always) part of discovery. The article by Langley and
Bridewell adopts this course of action by improving computational simulations of inductive
processes. An inductive process simulation is given the sorts of information a scientist might
have, like observations of continuous variables over time and generic processes; from this
and other information, the program generates candidate models, most plausible but some
implausible. Langley and Bridewell describe an improved program that reduces the number
of candidate models and eliminates implausible ones without sacricing model accuracy.
They include results from several application areas.
This kind of program highlights the importance of theoretical constraints on model build-
ing. It could also potentially serve as an aid for scientists constructing models. Shrager
et al.s article describes a different computational aid to discovery. Cache is designed to
scaffold collaboration by providing web-based decision support. The primary example is
genetics; the goal of Cache is to continually update discoveries and broadcast that informa-
tion to the research community, saving everyone the trouble of digging through the literature
to retrace the path of discoveries of new gene functions, re-analyses of these discoveries,
and further iterations. The end result is a community that is immediately informed about
any new knowledge concerning the function of genesand the sources of the knowledge.
Each practitioner in the community who adds information is identied, and the path of
practitioner discoveries and modications is made available to the community. Cache is
therefore not a computational simulation; it is a way of tracking, organizing, and publishing
a research communitys own inference processes.
Shrager et al.s article raises interesting questions for future research. Would Cache com-
bat conrmation bias? What kind of collaborations would be facilitated by CACHEand
what kind might actually be hindered? Perhaps CACHE could have heuristic value, as a
complement to existing systemsand as a way to encourage and monitor the formation of
trading zones (Collins, Evans, & Gorman, 2007) among researchers from different disciplin-
ary communities. (See concluding section entitled Trading zones, interactional expertise,
and future research in cognition in science and technology.)
Cache allows precise tracing of the web of inferences and people that lead to the current
state of knowledge. Therefore, Cache could potentially be of great value to psychologists of
science, providing a trace of the community research process that could suggest directions
for further research.
6. Shared cognition in teams
The issue includes one theory paper as well, by Paletz and Schunn, that provides an
extensive review of the literature on shared cognition in teams, referring to concepts like
Michael E. Gorman Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 683
shared mental models and transactive memory. They create a framework for future research
that focuses on convergent and divergent processes, focusing on how team structures and
processes affect outcomes. A convergent process will include formal roles for team mem-
bers and shared mental models, leading to a consensus on the outcome. A divergent process
will take advantage of diversity in team members expertise and result in multiple scenarios
for action. The two processes can be used by the same team at different phases. The Mars
exploration teams serve as an example throughout; the authors are currently conducting
research on the extensive transcript data produced by the Mars Rover teams. One strength
of this approach is the way the cognitive and social are combined, as they are in Nerses-
sians research.
The authors conclude by recommending a research program that would compare
multidisciplinary and nonmultidisciplinary groups in science and engineering, using both
experimental and in vivo measures and keeping track of multiple variables. Such
research could only be conducted by a multidisciplinary team, because the point would be
to triangulate different methods and measures.
Notes
1. Papers on this theme may be shared among more than one issue, depending on the
publishers page limits and other constraints.
2. There is an extensive developmental-cognitive literature comparing conceptual
change in children to scientists, using a variety of tasks. Piaget famously proposed that
the childs development of scientic concepts might parallel the historical evolution
of science (Piaget & Garcia, 1989), but there is no consensus that he was right (Kuhn,
1989). Child-scientist comparisons may be of value in understanding the kinds of
conceptual shifts that Kuhn characterized as paradigms (Kuhn, 1962; Vosniadou &
Brewer, 1992), but there are enough differences between children and scientists to
justify focusing on the latter rather than the former, given the limited space in this
special issue (Gorman, 2006).
3. Actually, Bells two most signicant patents were for improvements in telegraphy that
included transmission of speech as one of the improvements; they did not contain the
word telephone, which came into our modern usage later.
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