Portal:Complex Systems Digital Campus/E-Laboratory on Integrative Cognitive Science: from individual cognition to social cognition

Portal:Complex_Systems_Digital_Campus/E-Laboratory_on_Integrative Cognitive Science: from individual cognition to social cognition 2.5. From individual cognition to social cognition

Cognition is information processing, understood in a wide sense, that is, including all related aspects such as, for instance, interpretation processes. A cognitive system is thus an information processing system. It can be embedded in a single individual or distributed over a large number of individuals. We would talk of individual cognition or distributed cognition. Social cogition is a cognitive process distributed over all members of a society, interacting within a social network. Individual cognition as well might be considered as distributed cognition over a neural network.

In social networks, some information reaches some agents, then its content is processed by the social network, producing other pieces of information and other social links following series of interactions. This process of social cognition could thus lead to a transformation of the social network.

At individual and collective levels alike, cognitive processes are obeying strong constraints: individuals cannot achieve anything outside of what they are able to do themselves or in interaction with others; nothing can be anticipated outside of what they can predict alone or by interacting with others. Both the network structure and the nature of interactions are as such strong constraints on cognitive processes.

New protocols appear which make it possible to describe or quantify these constraints at the infra-individual, individual and collective levels, thus suggesting, in turn, new models. The quick migration of social interactions towards digital media enables the massive collection of data on social cognition, from the viewpoint of both its processes (spatial structure of interactions, temporal distributions, etc.) and its products (online documents, user-focused data, etc.). The coexitence of these two phenomena opens today new perspectives for the study of individual and social cognition on the basis of benchmarking models with empirical data. This ought to be a major ambition for a better understanding of the evolution of our societies.

Challenges •	1st Challenge: Individual cognition, cognitive constraints and decision proceses •	2nd Challenge: Modeling the dynamics of scientific communities •	3rd Challenge: Society of the Internet, Internet of the society 1st challenge: Individual cognition, cognitive constraints and decision processes The relationship between high-level and low-level cognitive processes remains an unsettled issue: the link between dynamic processes in the neural network and symbolic processes as they are being studied by psychology and linguistics is still open to question. A promising approach consists in exploring in a much more precise manner meso-scale spatio-temporal dynamics, like for example cortical columns, synchronized neural assemblies (or, more broadly, polysynchronic assemblies). These spatio-temporal dynamics may be useful in attesting symbolic processes. In order to understand better the transition from dynamic and symbolic processes, a theoretical and methodological questioning, as well as sharing data from very large databases provided with their metadata appears to be unavoidable.

Significant progress towards this challenge would not only lead to unifying an essential aspect of cognitive science, but would also launch much more strongly the new discipline of neuroeconomics: observing neural activity brings a novel viewpoint on the study of human behavior towards « nature » or in relation with strategic and social interactions with other individuals. From the perspective of cognitive economics, this brings hopes that decision theory could be revisited, as well as standard game theory, including the notions of « preference » and « utility » which are funding economic theory. 2nd challenge: Modeling the dynamics of scientific communities Scientific communities constitute a privileged area for the study of social cognition because both the structure of the underlying networks (team organization, collaboration networks, co-authorship networks, citation networks) and the production of these communities (conferences, journals, papers) is known in a dynamic fashion. In order to exchange concepts, scientific communities create their own language whose evolution reflects their own activity. This makes it possible to address very precise topics pertaining to how these scientific communities are collectively processing information – to cite a few: how new concepts or new issues are being adopted? What are remarkable structures for innovation diffusion (effect of authorities, local traditions, etc.). What is the effect of the breakdown of individuals in communities or the creation of links between communities on the development of knowledge? Which are the relationships between individual trajectories and community evolutions? What tools should we create to visualize dynamically the evolution of scientific paradigms, taking into account the continuing input of scientific production?

Keywords: scientometrics, epistemology, collective discovery, concept diffusion, collaboration networks.

Examples: •	Emergence and diffusion of new concepts in bibliographical databases •	Detection of emerging scientific fields •	Dynamics of collaboration networks •	Paradigmatic comparison of distinct scientific communities or institutions 3rd challenge: Society of the Internet, Internet of the society The quantity of information stored on the Internet will soon have strongly overwhelmed that stored on paper. The Internet concentrates today various types of knowledge storage systems (papers, encyclopedias, etc.). It is also a place where discussions (weblogs, forums) and commercial transactions (auction and trade websites) occur, referencing is being produced (for individuals through personal webpages as well as for institutions and organizations), it is place which serves as an external memory for relationship networks (friendship networks, workgroups, etc.) and, also, it is a « world agenda » with hundreds of thousands of events which are being announced every day. What modifications this new tool is presently bringing to social cognition processes (new kinds of encounters, new kinds of exchange, new kinds of debates, new kinds of collective building of knowledge)? For the first time, we may empirically work on this type of data with a fairly large spatio-temporal precision. How could we use these new sources of information to better understand social dynamics and create and provide tools to visualize the complexity of social activity which the Internet is revealing? A major challenge is to transform raw information available from the Internet in structured flows of information which make it possible to visualize, model and rebuild social cognition processes at work on the web, in a multiscale fashion.

Keywords: Geolocalized indexing, social emotion diffusion, epistemic communities, social dynamics and cultural evolution, visualization, collective building of knowledge

Examples: •	Impact of weblogs in political and civil debates, •	New dynamics for the collective elaboration of knowledge (Wikipedia, open-source software, etc.) , •	Measuring the propagation of social emotion following important social events, through the number of requests (ex: Google trends) , •	Comparative study of cultural differences through geo-localized informations (semantics in webpages, tags, requests on search engines, etc.), reconstruction of cultural territories. Formation