Augmentation of Human Intelligence

Human intelligence can be augmented and amplified by cognitive artifacts. A famous quote of Einstein states: "My pencil is cleverer then I", referring to his pencil's abality to fixate temporary results on paper, freeing up his working memory and thereby enabling him to solve an arithmetic problem in increments. Without the pencil and paper, he would have to store the results of the increments in short term memory, quickly exceeding its limits.

Examples of cognitive artifacts are: Todo lists, reminders, calculators, computers, external information stores, etc. Their common denominator (in this context) is that they help us extend our cognitive abilities.

It should be noted that it is not particularly fruitful to consider cognitive phenomena without incorporating the surrounding world in the analysis. In a theoretical paper by Koriat and Goldsmith (1996) a call is made of a change of metaphor in conceptualizing memory. Rather than the storehouse metaphor, Koriat and Goldsmith opt for a correspondance metaphor, in which memory is conceived of as a means of interacting with the real world. Similarly, Edwin Hutchins has in his book Distributed Cognition proposed to view cognitive phenomenon as residing in both humans, the physical world and the interplay between the two. Such a change in metaphor suggests a shift in the research setting, emphasising the use of naturalistic settings more extensively than is the norm today.