Historically, the broad concensus in the cognitive science community has been that the individual person, or even the individual brain is the best unit of analysis for human cognition. The material assembled for this course provides an alternative framework: Distributed Cognition.

We will focus on how cognition extends beyond the boundaries of the person to include the environment, artifacts, social interactions, and culture. Many of the most important cognitive processes involve interactions among brain, body, and culturally organized world for action.

Major course themes include the history and philosophy of cognitive science, the role of artifacts in human cognition, socially distributed cognition, the role of the body and action in cognition, and how all of these things change through time.