ABSTRACT
Distributed systems of cognition are receiving increasing attention in a variety of research traditions. A central question is how the specific features of cognitive functions will be affected by their occurrence within a system of cooperative agents. In this paper, we will examine the less often considered aspects of the organization of cooperative work settings that can become important in terms of error within a system. Specifically, we examine how response to error in a cooperative task can in some ways benefit future task performance. The goal is to facilitate learning from error so that future errors become less likely. The study involved an analysis of observations of several cooperative teams involved in coordinated activity for the navigation of a large ship. The analysis of the team member's activities revealed a surprisingly high rate of errors; yet, the final product of the group work showed that the error had been removed somewhere within the system. Features of the distributed system that facilitated this error removal included the monitoring of other's performance, as constrained by a horizon of observation, limiting exposure to particular subtasks; the distribution of knowledge within the team, such that more knowledgable members were also ones in a position to detect other's errors; and methods of providing feedback. In particular, specific design tradeoffs were found to underlie the functioning of the system. For example, evaluation depends on utilizing objective knowledge of how the product reconciles with the real world; however, separating evaluation from the system means “wasting” the knowledgable potential participant. Thus, the distributed system was found to contain certain properties that can be exploited for their utility in error detection, diagnosis, and correction. The results may be applied to the design of such cooperative tasks, including a role for technology, with the goal of designing cooperative systems that can more easily learn from their errors.
