Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatial navigation is a fundamental survival ability, and humans have evolved to navigate at the everyday scales of time and space that are experienced routinely. But some humans seem to shatter these limitations. Teams in the high-risk sport of rally racing must navigate complex courses at incredibly high speeds, where a single mistake can be fatal. How do rally teams accomplish navigation that is seemingly beyond the human scale? Here, we investigate rally racing to understand how distributed cognitive systems can accomplish spatial navigation at the extremes. By combining qualitative analysis, computer vision, and time series methods, we show how high-speed navigation is accomplished by a distributed system in which driver, co-driver, and cultural artifacts come into coordination. We end by discussing how extreme feats of cognition are made possible not by superhuman individuals, but by redistributing the computational burden across time, people, and artifacts.