Macrocognition
Open-knowledge reference entry
Macrocognition indicates a descriptive level of cognition performed in natural instead of artificial (laboratory) environments. This term is reported to have been coined by Pietro Cacciabue and Erik Hollnagel in 1995. However, it is also reported that it was used in the 1980s in European Cognitive Systems Engineering research. Possibly the earliest reference is the following, although it does not use the exact term "macrocognition":
A macro-theory is a theory which is concerned with the obvious regularities of human experience, rather than with some theoretically defined unit. To refer to another psychological school, it would correspond to a theory at the level of Gestalten. It resembles Newell’s suggestion for a solution that would analyse more complex tasks. However, the idea of a macro-theory does not entail an analysis of the mechanistic materialistic kind which is predominant in cognitive psychology. Thus we should have a macro-theory of remembering rather than of memory, to say nothing of short-term memory, proactive inhibition release, or memory scanning. To take another example, we should have a macro-theory of attending, rather than a mini-theory of attention, or micro-theories of limited channel capacities or logarithmic dependencies in disjunctive reaction times. This would ease the dependence on the information processing analogy, but not necessarily lead to an abandonment of the information processing terminology, the Flowchart, or the concept of control structures.
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This entry incorporates text from “Macrocognition” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.