Digital Technology and Cognitive Scaffolding

There is much ambivalence about digital technology. On the one hand, it makes many tasks much more efficient than they would otherwise be. We can do a quick internet search to find a phone number instead of scouring the phone book. We can use GPS instead of trying to figure out where we are on a paper map. Digital technology expands what we can do with our limited cognitive resources. At the same time, one might worry that digital technology is making us increasingly passive: willing and able to do a great deal less for ourselves. A common complaint is that one has trouble disconnecting from digital devices and that when we are connected to our devices, we passively receive information and entertainment.

Both sides are represented in philosophical and empirical literature as well. There is a long-standing tradition studying cognitive scaffolding: the use of the environment to augment our cognitive abilities. Sometimes we expand our cognitive repertoire by offloading the informational demands of a task onto features of the environment.[1] For instance, many of us can add large numbers using a pen and paper because it enables us to free up memory space by writing down the sums of previously added columns to be retrieved later. Major technological innovations such as the printing press and the digital computer enable us to offload the informational demands of various tasks onto features of our informationally rich environment. The result is a pressure pushing us toward developing new cognitive abilities that exploit the affordances of the technology we’ve created. It is, after all, just another feature of our environment once it has been created, a part of our “niche” with which we must cope much as we cope with the weather and the local predators.[2] This creates a feedback loop in which we modify our environment, it in turn exerts evolutionary pressures that select for cognitive abilities conducive to coping with it, which in turn modifies our cognition and makes us capable of creating new forms of technology, and so on. In the case of the internet, the amount of easily accessible information offers the potential to make our inquiries much more efficient than they would otherwise be.[3] This enables us to make use of information it would otherwise be incredibly cumbersome to acquire, expanding our knowledge as a result. The web is so vast that it appears to absorb and transform our relations to other forms of media (photographs, video footage, etc.), potentially making this feedback loop more consequential than previous ones.[4]We have long relied on photographs as an aid to memory, for instance, but we can now store and digitally search large libraries of photographs in a way that was not previously possible. By storing these libraries on our smartphones, we can access them away from home within seconds. This makes it possible for us to integrate our reliance on photographs more thoroughly into our daily lives.

Feedback loops of the sort described above involve reciprocal causation between the agent and the environment. Each is driving the other forward. Some worry that our current relation with much of our digital technology lacks this kind of reciprocity.[5] Instead, we are passively stimulated by internet content that makes minimal cognitive demands on us. Some worry that our cognitive (or, as it is sometimes put, “epistemic”) agency is disrupted as a result.[6] Our extensive use of digital technology compromises our ability to direct our own attention (a limited and valuable cognitive resource) and remember information without the assistance of scaffolds. In the 20^th century, people were better at remembering phone numbers than they are now. Back then, it was hard to get by without a good memory for phone numbers. So, we developed our memories accordingly. Now we outsource that task to our smartphones, through a combination of saving contacts and web search. We might then wonder to what extent we are scaffolding our cognition with digital technology, as opposed to bypassing it.

Here is one way we might pursue the question of whether any given digital technology is a scaffold or an impediment to our cognition. Sometimes after cognitively offloading, we become capable of something we might call “cognitive reloading”. To see what I mean, return to the example of doing arithmetic with pen and paper. That is an example of cognitive offloading. We use the paper as an external memory store. However, once we become sufficiently proficient at pen-and-paper arithmetic, we can solve problems by simulating it in our heads.[7] That is, if you don’t have a pen and paper handy, you can imagine yourself working it out on paper and get the answer that way. This won’t necessarily be as reliable as doing it on paper, it is usually harder to imagine something than see it. It is nonetheless significant. We start out by offloading the memory demands of a task onto a feature of the environment using our sensorimotor system, we then draw on the sensorimotor system to run an offline simulation of that very performance. This enables us to do something with our native, brain bound cognition we couldn’t have done before learning how to outsource the task. This can work because simulations are inner analogues to things in our environment. So, we can sometimes construct and manipulate an inner model of the technology we build externally. That makes it possible for us to incorporate some of the efficiency gained from the technology without becoming passive ourselves.

How does this bear on our use of digital technology? Settling the question would require us to look at instances of digital technology individually. However, for many of them the following seems to be true. The way the technology itself works is generally opaque to us. This contrasts with doing math on pen and paper. In that case, the algorithm used to compute the function is clear to the user. This makes it much easier to simulate the procedure later. In contrast, the algorithms used by apps, search engines, etc. tend to be unknown to the user. As a result, it is much less likely one can run an accurate simulation of, for example, a search engine query. This does not bode well for the prospect of cognitive reloading.

Here is another concern. Part of what makes it hard to cognitively reload is the extent of the demands reloading places on attention. Think of how hard it is to add two three-digit numbers in your head, especially if you have to carry multiple numbers across columns. Part of what makes this difficult is that it is hard to avoid getting distracted while you are doing it. With digital technology, part of the worry pessimists have is that it has a tendency to decrease our attention spans. If so, then it impedes our ability to cognitively reload anything at all. This worry is of course not uniform across all digital technologies. Software for practicing math and logic, for instance, is less concerning in this regard than social media. The point is that the concern arises for some of the most ubiquitous digital technology.[8]

Works Cited:

Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing, (Explorations in Cognitive Science), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clark, A. Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosphy of Cognitive Science (2^nd Edition). New York: Oxford University Press.

Gunn, H. & Lynch, M.P. (2021). “The Internet and Epistemic Agency”. In Jennifer Lackey, Applied Epistemology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (pp. 389-409).

Heersmink, R. & Sutton, J. (2020). “Cognition and the Web: Extended, Transactive, or Scaffolded?”. Erkenntnis, 85(1), 139-164.

Notes:

[1] See Clark (2013).

[2] See Sterelny (2012) for a book-length treatment of the topic.

[3] As Alesandra Tanesini has pointed out to me, the potential may not be realized because informational overload can give rise to inefficiencies.

[4] See Sparrow et al. (2011).

[5] See Huebner (2016), Heersmink & Sutton (2017).

[6] For example, Gunn & Lynch (2021).

[7] Cf. Smolensky (1988).

[8] This work was funded by the Therme Group and the AHRC Digital Knowledge project (grant  (AH/W008424/1).

Photo Scaffolding by Jennem on Flickr