Temporal Dynamics in Medical Visual Systems

This article applies the model of time scales and temporal ranges presented in Steffensen and Pedersen (2014) on real-life video-data from a medical field. It shows how medical decision-making is determined by local dynamics, socio-cultural patterns, and individual institutional experience. We argue that explanations of human interactivity cannot be confined to only one time scale. We exemplify our approach by investigating a case from emergency medicine where problem finding and problem solving is related to vision. In doing so, we pursue an ecological approach to visual systems, though we extend the approach by emphasizing that vision encompasses and meshes the present with the past and the future: the non-local is in the local. Hence, what a doctor sees, feels and perceives is both socially pre-organized through material-cultural artifacts and the implementation of procedures and narratives, and it is dynamical, anticipative and situated. Fine- grained analysis of the case leads us to conclude that a visual system is situated and sense-saturated, that is, it exploits sociocultural resources of the past. Human interactivity, conversation and vision are not purely situated as pre-supposed by many approaches to interaction, cognition and language.