John Sutton
Affiliation: University of Stirling
Category: Philosophy
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 15:30
Location: Gen. Henryk Dąbrowski Hall (006)
View the full session: Spatial Cognition
People do cross deserts and sail round the world on their own. We can navigate alone, and some people do so more effectively than others. But we also go places together – driving across a city, planning and taking a holiday trip, or walking together on a chilly Sunday afternoon. Collaborative wayfinding is ubiquitous in human life, spanning many situations and environments, enacted by different groups – families, couples, work colleagues, and many more. Yet, as recent reviews acknowledge, wayfinding as a social activity has barely been studied experimentally (Dalton et al 2019; Fernandez Velasco 2022; Curtin & Montello 2024). Further, the use of Google Maps and GPS devices does not inevitably make navigating together, around cities or on the road, any less challenging. Conflict in collaborative wayfinding is familiar to most of us, as is failure at it. Yet we know very little about how people use navigation technologies together – what mechanisms and conditions support benefits from collaboration, and what underlies ineffective group performance?
This talk offers a critical review of existing experimental studies of collaborative wayfinding, and a focussed set of puzzling and neglected problems about the topic that are open to tractable empirical enquiry. The aims are, firstly, to enlist informed cross-disciplinary input on immediate theoretical puzzles, and secondly, to open up collaborative opportunities for integrated research programs on social aspects of navigation in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Despite Hutchins’ influential study of historically and culturally diverse forms of navigation in Cognition in the Wild (1995), cognitive studies of collaborative wayfinding have not been well integrated with anthropological or cross-cultural work: there is room for healing between antagonistic experimental and ethnographic approaches.
Research in parallel domains offers potential insight and experimental tips. From social ontology and the psychology of group process we can draw concepts and models for assessing process gains or losses from different kinds of interaction among differently-constituted groups on tasks with different demands (Theiner, Allen, & Goldstone 2010). From work on team cognition and joint know-how we can draw analyses of different ways that individual group members’ capacities interact (Eccles 2008; Birch 2019; Sutton 2024).
In particular, we can learn from 15 years of experimental work on collaborative memory (Hirst et al 2018; Meade et al 2018), where other people were seen as negative influences, sources of contagion for the isolated individual brain. Redesigning experiments on remembering together in light of distributed cognition, we showed that microprocesses between group members with established expertise or a rich shared history (such as older couples) drive collaborative facilitation through cross-cuing and resilient processes of repair (Sutton et al 2010, Harris et al 2014). Translating to collaborative navigation requires careful incorporation of emotions in interaction, and careful choices of task environments. We also need to include high-end expert collaborators, analogous to the individual wayfinding expertise displayed by London taxi drivers in the remarkable empirical research program led by Maguire and Spiers (Griesbauer et al 2022). Professional search and rescue teams, for example, may have developed, or be quickly able to develop, effective divisions of labour in complex navigation tasks: we can ask what each group member brings to the collaborative activity, and what each does in that activity, looking for conditions that might support emergence, the production of group outcomes that are better or richer than the mere additive juxtaposition of each individual’s contribution.
Collaborative wayfinding sometimes simply is a form of collaborative recall, when the capacity to navigate together effectively depends on jointly remembering spatial information that was encoded together during earlier joint action. One recent study asks how shared spatial knowledge develops through collaborative navigation in unfamiliar areas of Paris (Quesnot & Guelton 2023): a close critical analysis of the experimental design and measures in this original research seeks to identify a clearer way to assess potential collaborative process gains and losses, better methods to tap the microprocesses of embodied interaction in small groups remembering routes together.
The talk then pinpoints three natural paths for expanding the unit of analysis in the cognitive science of navigation, while retaining firm contact with existing research. First, collaborative conditions can be added to experimental studies of individual wayfinding: two examples are given. Second, work on mechanisms of collective navigation in non-human animals can suggest computationally-tractable investigation of common wayfinding processes across humans and certain kinds of flocks, herds, or swarms, as well as identifying the limits of such cross-species analogy (Fernandez Velasco 2022). Finally and relatedly, attention is required to the central roles played in human collaborative wayfinding by diverse forms of epistemic engineering: human-specific forms of linguistic and non-verbal communication, joint use of navigation technologies, and reliance on diverse symbolic artifacts, from maps and GPS devices to landmarks, signs, and other humans.
Concluding with a call to collaborative research action in studying how people navigate together, the talk finishes by pointing to the complexity and diversity of the cognitive ecologies in which collaborative wayfinding unfolds. Do individuals with different preferences and strategies in their individual spatial cognition combine more or less effectively when asked to collaborate? How are GPS technologies used in collaborative practice, and what enduring effects do they have on spatial learning? By attending more closely to shared histories and the microprocesses of communication among interacting navigators, can we underscore the need for a robust science of individual cognition within a broader anti-individualist ‘4E’ approach: rather than downplaying or effacing individual minds, the sciences of collaborative wayfinding will need to foreground the different capacities that different individuals bring to shared navigation tasks, and the different roles that individuals play in group activities. Likewise, understanding the causes of navigational failure, which can have catastrophic consequences, requires attention not only to individual performance, but also to group dynamics and varied divisions of cognitive labour. It is high time for the cognitive sciences thus to highlight and study the sociality of typical wayfinding practices.