Norman (1993) argued that the human cognitive capacity is often overestimated; in fact, without external aids, humans only have very limited memory and reasoning capacity for cognitive-related tasks. When a cognitive task becomes highly demanding, an agent often needs to make use of his/her external world and possible fellow inquirers as sources of knowledge, organisers of activity, and in general as extensions of his or her cognition to increase work capacity . More often and not, such resources are also accompanied by the use of socio-culturally developed cognitive tools or artifacts (Resnick, Säljö & Pontecorvo, 1997). By using cognitive tools and other artifacts, unnecessary cognitive load can be reduced such that the limited memory can be spared for more complicated tasks (Pea, 1993; Salomon, Perkins, & Globerson, 1991).
What are Cognitive Tools? Cognitive tools are often referred to as:
Besides cognitive tools, there is another category of tools which is often called the productivity tools. Have a look at the following video to understand what productivity tools are. Types of Cognitive Tools Based on Jonassen (2000), cognitive tools can exist in the following forms:
Nuutinen, Sutinen, Botha, & Kommers (2010) summarize the characteristics of cognitive tools (aka mindtool) as follows:
Some New Developments
Early works on cognitive tools focused largely on tools that advanced individual learning but more recent thinking and advances in technology permit considering how computers can serve as cognitive tools to enable new forms of social knowledge construction (Lajoie, 2000). Theories on cognition have traditionally served to examine an individual's mental processes. As a consequence, traditional cognitive theories are often found to focuse on analysing how an individual agent processes mental representations. In recent developments, cognitive psychology has increasingly emphasized the socially distributed (or shared) nature of cognition. This leads to Distributed Cognition which refers to a process in which the cognitive resources are shared socially between agents and artifacts in the environment. By having more cognitive resources coming together, complex tasks can be accomplished more probably than an individual's own resources (see http://nexus.hs-bremerhaven.de/library.nsf/bf25ab0f47ba5dd785256499006b15a4/30bb62d76118ded3c12578530056a136/$FILE/CollaborativeLearning.pdf). The advances of distributed cognition and technologies have given new roles to cognitive tools. In general, cognitive tools are used in the following situations:
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