Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition

Book excerpt: Aims to undo this figure-ground relationship between cognitive and social processes. The chapters in Part One, by developmental, social, and educational psychologists and an anthropologist, explore the role of the immediate social situation in cognition, offering challenges from the mild to the deeply unsettling to psychologists' traditional assumptions about cognition, competence, and performance. In Part Two, chapters by a psychologist/anthropologist explore from a linguistic perspective the various and often hidden ways in which the social permeates thinking, especially by shaping the forms of reasoning and language use available to members of a community. Part Three contains three chapters by psycholinguists, a sociologist, and social psychologists that examine the way language functions in face-to-face communication. Part Four, in chapters by an anthropologist, developmental psychologists, and social psychologists, examines the sources, individual and social, of shared cultural knowledge. Part Five contains chapters by an anthropologist and by social and cognitive psychologists examining the structure and processes of cognitive collaboration in work situations. In Part Six, several chapters by developmental psychologists consider the individual in sociocognitive activity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).