Cognitive Artifacts, Affordances, and External Representations: Implications for Cognitive Sociology – Culture, Cognition, and Action (culturecog)

We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do …

We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do lists to organize work tasks, and those of us who engage in statistical or computational analysis of data use computer programs to perform complex calculations that would be impossible to perform without them. In this post, I argue that cognitive sociologists should pay more attention to cognitive artifacts and their affordances since many cognitive processes in our everyday lives cannot be properly

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