My primary research focus these days is on collectively held cognitive systems (i.e. ones that are distributed, with some mix of complementarity and sharing)—and, more narrowly, on those (“cultural models”) which enable/produce the similarities we observe in the actions and interpretations of actions of members of one cultural group (or subgroup) vs. of another. I am interested not just in describing such systems, but more especially in understanding how they are learned, coded (in individuals’ internal representations) and linked to the individual action schemas that actually produce behavior. I am interested, diachronically, in how these collectively held cognitive entities arise (are created) and adapt. I’ve gotten into this through a research history that began with the semantics and pragmatics of kinship terminologies and kin groups, that broadened out to a concern with the “meaning” and use of everyday words (involving contrast relations, reference, and the nature of usage--including denotative, connotative, and figurative usage), and that then moved out to non-linguistic cognition. In the cultural models area (in cooperation with various colleagues) I have played explored conceptions of romantic love and of good vs. bad ranches and ranchland—each across some range of sub-cultural groups and perspectives. I have also explored multiple conceptions of salient ethnic groups.
Part of my particular viewpoint comes from thinking about non-mysterious ways in which Durkheimian “emergent properties”, including, in particular, “collective representations”, might be understood and might arise. This approach involves significant attention to concept formation strategies and constraints, to the use of the role of feedback, and to clean prototypic representations of messy external phenomena; it includes an approach to learning that derives heavily from Piaget, but with social feedback added in.
My approach to these things is heavily “agent-based”. This approach is best illustrated in my “starling flock” simulation, which used a very simple procedure to generate social-behavioral (but not cognitive) emergent properties for a “flock” of birds seeking “food”. At one level, the program amounts to a simulation of simple mob behavior. At another level, the simulation—even while only involving a single “flock” with no con-specific competition and no predators—produced results interestingly consistent with optimal foraging theory. My brother and I are currently re-vivifying this simulation, with an aim to expand its range of coverage and to make it easy for others to play with.
I am interested, from the above perspective, in the cognitive capacities of other (especially social) species, in how these relate the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of human cognition, and in the phylogeny and well as ontogeny of these capacities.
David B. Kronenfeld
Department of Anthropology
UC Riverside