[Page 617]In the interest of developing a fuller, more defensible account of human cognitive function, several authors have advocated for the creation of an approach that makes recourse to concepts and elements located outside of the individual human thinker. Consequently, a novel orientation to studying cognition has emerged, dubbed distributed cognition (DC). DC is based on the premise that the only way to understand how human beings function is to observe them acting in authentic, everyday contexts. Within this paradigm, large amounts of real-world data (e.g., field notes, video recordings, transcripts, artifacts) are examined and analyzed.

The main objective of DC is to understand what people know, how they know what they know, and how they put this knowledge to work in real-life contexts to solve ...