UC San Diego

This dissertation reexamines the role of behavioral analysis to propose a modified research program for socio- cognitive phenomena--demonstrating its potential by presenting a two-step proof-of-concept on baboon data. I build on two Complex Systems Thinking approaches to behavior -- Hinde's model of social complexity, and Hutchins' theory of distributed cognition. By giving Hinde and Hutchins a state-space framing I can apply a well- established tool-kit of sequential analysis for social interactions. These analyses represent a shift in emphasis from asking 'what-is-it-for' to how-does-it-work'. First, I examine male-female-infant relations in the period after birth to demonstrate how to create a more systematic tracking of social complexity, emphasizing context : By building immediate context directly into the data- structures I can use the same data structure to look at study factors from long-term cumulative context of both relationships and group structure. By analyzing state- transitions over independent tallies I am able to relate interaction dynamics more directly to successive levels of social complexity. Second, I track distributed cognition by looking at consort turnover (CTO) events as socio- cognitive systems that resolve 'who will be the next consort male?' Instead of performance measures based on outcome, the system-level regularities allow me to track individual profiles of participation. Behavioral traces of Extended-Embodied Distributed Cognition 'leak' outward from the skull to the physical and social environment and spread to the whole body. I use a video segment of a CTO event to demonstrate how to capture embodied attention by tracking head movements relative to body orientation. The proof-of-concept demonstrate how a state-space approach and the tools of sequential analysis-multiway contingency tables analysis for categorical data and timeseries analysis for continuous data representation-provides a shared framing that allows integrating the pieces of social complexity and distributed cognition into a single research program to look at socio-cognitive phenomena in other contexts and across species. Polyadic interactions offer opportunities to see inside the black boxes of social complexity and cognition. Analyzing socio-cognitive behavior at multiple levels of social complexity can be viewed as an extra-somatic extension of Senjowski & Churchland (1990) now famous hierarchy of structural levels of brain investigation