Tag: cognition
2 items with this tag.
Distributed cognition
Distributed cognition is the idea that thinking happens across people, the tools they use, and the settings they work in, as well as inside individual heads. In healthcare it describes reasoning shared between clinicians, patients, records, and increasingly AI systems, and it shifts the question from what one clinician knows to how well the whole system thinks.
Similarities between AI and human thinking: What if we're the language models?
Discussion of AI and human cognition usually dwells on the differences. Turn the question around and the terminology of language models describes human thinking surprisingly well: context windows, biased training data, tokenisation, temperature, hallucination, system prompts, and pattern matching all have human counterparts, some of which health professions education already has names for. The similarities say something about our own cognitive architecture, and the strength of our resistance to them says something about what our professional identities depend on.