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…