Where to find the mind: Identifying the scale of cognitive dynamics

Abstract: There are ongoing divisions in the learning sciences between perspectives that treat cognition as occurring within individual minds and those that treat it as irreducibly distributed or situated in material and social contexts. We contend that accounts of individual minds as complex systems are theoretically continuous with distributed and situated cognition. On this view, the difference is a matter of the scale of the dynamics of interest, and the choice of scale can be informed by data. In this paper, we propose heuristics for empirically determining the scale of the relevant cognitive dynamics. We illustrate these heuristics in two contrasting cases, one in which the evidence supports attributing cognition to a group of students and one in which the evidence supports attributing cognition to an individual.