Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Various aspects of task settings, including the actors and the physical environment, interact in complex ways in the construction and selection of action. In this paper, w e examine the process of collaborative mediation, that is, h ow collaborators facilitate activity by making aspects of the setting available or accessible to the principal actor. W e investigate collaborative mediation in three activities: verbal descriptions of strongly structured objects, such as one's house; cooperative computer use; and parent-child cooking. In each of these cases, the collaborator's role with respect to the principal actor and the rest of the setting differs, but they are ail of similar kind. The collaborator makes available different aspects of the setting (physical setting, goals, tests of success, etc.) as needed at appropriate moments, thus helping to operationalize goals via physical guidance, advice, indication of aspects of the setting to make them accessible or relevant, or the taking of initiative which moves the activity forward more directly. Our analysis elaborates the methods by which agents can mediate one another's construction of the settings in which they find themselves, and so facilitate successful activity. We thus extend and generalize similar analyses and approach a general theory.