Dynamic decision making is an important area in the modern business world. This study provides a theoretical framework for the cognitive process of dynamic decision making. The framework consists of two problem spaces and cognitive operators in the spaces. Two experiments of computer simulated management games were conducted to evaluate group problem solving as a method to increase performance in dynamic decision making. The results indicate that group problem solving is effective when the task is simple, but does not increase performance when the problem is relatively more complex. However, there is a positive correlation between the diversity of inferences and the high performance in dynamic decision making regardless of grouping. This paper concludes with candidate explanations about the interaction between problem complexity and divergent inference.

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This study examined students' collaborative learning activity and assessed whether fostering problem-centred explanation would increase their performance on conceptual change measures. The domain of investigation is biological evolution. Participants were 60 high-school students randomly assigned to three experimental conditions: (a) Problem-centred explanation, (b) Argumentation, and (c) Knowledge-Activation. Different experimental prompts were provided to foster various kinds of collaborative constructive activity in order to assess the differential effects on conceptual change. The findings showed that problem-centred explanation group outperformed the knowledge-activation group and scored higher than the argumentation group on a number of measures. Students' constructive activity, which involves viewing knowledge as problematic and constructing explanations to deal with such difficulties, may play an important role in collaborative learning.

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Collaborative problem solving is an activity which appears to require a high degree of intersubjective knowledge between participants about the sequence and content of activities prior to engaging in them. Without such intersubjectivity, collaborators would duplicate efforts and have to constantly explain their actions to one another. Conversational analysis research states that intersubjective knowledge is a precondition to engaging in activities which are content dependent. However, we show that this is not always the case. We present an analysis of two programmers working side-by-side in which intersubjective knowledge about their individual activities occurred during and not prior to activity engagement. This was possible because the media properties when working side-by-side allowed the collaborators to construct a shared working context in which they could notice opportunities to coordinate content-dependent activities. Moreover, individual-related grounding activities are the catalysts for constructing these contexts. We argue that the ability to easily shift from a personal to a shared workspace is a fundamental requirement for joint activity, as such shifts provide a media-rich context for more effective grounding and coordination of detailed activities. We end by discussing the implications of this research for theories of collaborative problem solving and for designers of remote collaboration tools. This research contributes to our understanding of the intricacies of human collaborative problem solving.

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This paper discusses the design of computer representation, based on a case study of computer animation projects in a university level design program. In the case study, a group of students reproduced the motions of living things on a computer, based on observations made in an aquarium. The following interpretations based on the “Situated Approach to Cognition” were derived from the examination of the case study. First, the computer representation of the motion of living things using methods such as “highlighting”, “plotting”, “semitransparency” is designed to visualize the motion of living things, not just copy that motion. The group of students “Localize” how to see the motion of living things by alternating between observation and representation, and using juxtaposed “Resources” such as additional computer animation, video movies of living things, references which describe the motion of the living things, and observations of “real” living things, and the developing representation and by referring to them mutually many times reflexivily. Second, the representation and the cognition of the motion of living things are here reconstructed and embedded in a situated environment of mutual social interaction among students and teachers, who share their ideas of problems in representing and cognizing the motion of living things through conversations and by viewing each others representations as their work progresses.

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As the proverb “two heads are better than one” says, people often expect that collaborative activities bring about emergence of knowledge or ideas. In order to confirm whether there is actually the possibility of emergence through collaboration, the authors investigated actual collaborative activities in research & development processes based on the hierarchical interview method. First, a case study of developing a new impactful detergent was made in detail. As a result, three kinds of collaboration (interdepartmental collaboration, interdisciplinary one between two teams, and interdisciplinary one between two individual members) were observed. Especially, an interdepartmental collaboration was clarified to be significant in the case. Second, some cases of collaboration which were brought about in a relatively short time span were analyzed and, as a result, collaborative interactions in organizational knowledge creation were classified into three types. This study indicates that new ideas or knowledge can be emerged through collaboration in actual research & development processes.

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This paper describes current work in visual search within a framework derived from the feature integration theory (FIT) of attention proposed by Treisman and her colleagues. Following topics are reviewed; parallel processing for feature conjunction, distractor homogeneity, display element similarity, multiple conjunction, multiple targets, task-dependent search, eye movements and learning effect. Such work is central to the study of attention and currently among the most active areas. These studies raise some critical questions about FIT; the nature of a feature map and the dichotomy of parallel and serial processing. Three models of visual search, that is, SERR, guided search and multiresolutional models, are compared each other. Their capabilities are evaluated with critical phenomena of search asymmetry, negative search functions, and so on. Finally, we discuss how these models can be linked.

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