Tufft, Miles Robert Alan; (2022) Cognition-in-the-World: The Cognitive Attunement Hypothesis of Social Offloading. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Cognition is at home in a lived-in world. We are embedded in complex environments and generate our understanding of the world through countless active and action- oriented involvements with the objects and other people surrounding us. In this thesis, I explore the philosophical and psychological foundations that underpin this view of situated, action-derived sense-making, and in doing so, I propose the fundamental importance of contexts in constituting cognition and shaping adaptive human behaviour. My central claim is that the complex and dynamic contexts we encounter will be reflected in the sensitivity of implicit cognitive processes to those contexts, and I call this, cognitive attunement. By reviewing joint action research and presenting novel experimental data, I propose the cognitive attunement hypothesis as a framework by which we can understand the basic way cognition is calibrated and tuned for a lived- in world. For my methodological approach, I have developed joint gameplay versions of the picture-word and spatial cuing paradigms, embedding participants in controlled dyadic interactions that are well placed to reveal the coupling between social contexts and implicit processing. Across 12 experiments and close to 1000 participants, I present evidence for information relinquishing processes that I claim work in adaptive balance with information acquiring processes such as task co-representation. By automatically filtering distracting information deemed to be the responsibility of a co-acting partner, participants reliably demonstrate reduced cognitive interference and improved task performance – social offloading. I then show that these effects are meaningfully sensitive to social contexts since they depend on complex constructs such as the social status, competency, or cooperative intentions of co-actors, reflecting their cognitive attunement. I finish by discussing the possible mechanisms that underpin social offloading, and the implications that ground-level implicit situational sensitivity has for tuning us into the world and unlocking the diversity of complex social environments – cognition-in-the-world.

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