A Short Primer on Situated Cognition

In recent years there has been a lot of buzz about a new trend in cognitive science. The trend is associated with terms like 'embodiment', 'enactivism', 'distributed cognition', and 'the extended mind'. The ideas expressed using these terms are a diverse and sundry lot, but three of them stand out as especially central. First, cognition depends not just on the brain, but also on the body (the embodiment thesis). Second, cognitive activity routinely exploits structure in the natural and social environment (the embedding thesis). Third, the boundaries of cognition extend beyond the boundaries of individual organisms (the extension thesis). Each of these theses contributes to a picture of mental activity as dependent on the situation or context in which it occurs, whether that situation or context is relatively local (as in the case of embodiment) or relatively global (as in the case of embedding and extension). It is this picture of the mind that lies at the heart of