Summary
Cognitive ecology is the study of thinking in its setting: how perceiving, remembering and reasoning depend on bodies, tools, other people and surroundings, as well as on what happens in one head. Edwin Hutchins set it out in a 2010 paper, defining it as “the study of cognitive phenomena in context” and pointing to “the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem”.
Hutchins names three earlier projects of this kind: James Gibson’s ecological psychology, Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind and Soviet activity theory. Bateson’s example is a blind man with a stick: where does his ‘self’ stop – brain, hand, or the tip of the stick?
Rationale
When Part 1 calls cognition “embodied, ecological and distributed”, the middle word carries this meaning. It’s why we look at the conditions around people as well as the messages sent to them.