Cognition in the Wild Ch. 5: "Communication"

Theme of the reading
This chapter has two main parts. The first part looks closely at actual instances of communication between members of the navigation team. A commonsense model of communication holds that a sender encodes meaning in a message and sends the message to a receiver. The receiver then extracts the meaning from the sent message. This model is WRONG. A detailed examination of how communication actually happens when people work with each other in a rich task environment shows that meanings of messages are not simply encoded in the structure of the message. Instead, meanings are negotiated by the people involved in the communication using a variety of resources in the setting.

The second part of the chapter provides a criticism of another commonsense belief about communication. Many people assume that social systems can always be made more effective by increasing the amount of communication in the systems. This is also WRONG. This is demonstrated by the behavior of computer simulations of group communication.

Getting ready to read
Definitions:
Prosody: patterns of cadence and stress in spoken language.
Indexical reference: elements of language that rely for their meaning on the context in which they are produced.
High-bandwidth communication: dense communication that carries a lot of information.

Reading
Orienting questions and issues to keep in mind:

In what sense can language be taken to be a determinant of individual cognition?
In what sense can language be taken to be a determinant of distributed cognition?
What resources do the navigators use to establish the meanings of the things their teammates say?

What is confirmation bias?
What role does it play in the simulation models?
What is the fundamental cognitive tradeoff concerning the formation of interpretations of the world?
Which parameters of the communication model are manipulated in the simulations?
What are some aspects of real communication that the simulation model makes no effort to model?
How does it happen that a group can have different cognitive properties than the cognitive properties of any member of the group?