Distributed cognitions

Traditionally, human cognition has been seen as existing solely "inside" a person's head, and studies on cognition have by and large disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition takes place. Recently, however, research in cognition and in such fields as anthropology and cultural psychology has compelled us to reexamine our preconceptions. The essays in this volume propose that a clearer understanding of human cognition would be achieved if studies were based on the concept that cognition is distributed among individuals, that knowledge is socially constructed through collaborative efforts to achieve shared objectives in cultural surroundings, and that information is processed between individuals and the tools and artifacts provided by culture. Although the phenomenon of distributed cognitions is a wide-ranging one with provocative consequences for theories of the mind, learning, and education, it has not yet been thoroughly examined. When "distributed cognitions" are the units of analysis for research and theory construction about reasoning and learning, several questions arise: What exactly is distributed and how does it become distributed? Are