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In this chapter I address a gap in the study of medieval space, namely that there has been no systematic study by either medievalists or road historians of how European road travellers in the later Middle Ages found their way around: between countries, from one part of a country to another, or within unfamiliar towns and cities. How did travellers plan their journeys? What aids did they use for getting to their destinations? I present some of the evidence for medieval wayfinding, and provide some initial answers to these questions. I consider the use of guides, landmarks, maps, and urban signage, and draws on evidence from English literary texts and English-French phrasebooks. Wayfinding is simultaneously a technology, a memorial practice, and a cognitive competency. I argue that medieval wayfinding is best understood as a form of what Edwin Hutchins calls ‘naturally situated cognition’ or ‘distributed cognition, in that it depends on human co-operation. Moreover, the environment for medieval travellers was divided up into smaller, more manageable pieces and interconnections – what Kevin Lynch describes as paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks – that constitute a hierarchy of spatial knowledge that is significantly different from our understanding and negotiation of space today.

Informed by a review of recent attempts in cognitive science to overcome head-bound conceptions of the mind, this chapter investigates the contribution of ‘situated’ approaches to understanding music and consciousness, focusing on musical experience. It develops a systematic framework for discriminating between situated approaches, and based on this framework and an analysis of specific scenarios discusses the ways in which musical experience may be conceptualized as ‘situated’, elucidating the implications and explanatory potential of different approaches. Finally, there is a consideration of the framework’s value as a research tool for the analysis of situated aspects of musical practices. The aim is to advance an understanding of music and consciousness by contributing to conceptual clarity and by enriching the relationship between theoretical considerations and observation of musical practice.

The Afterword reframes this volume’s questions by arguing in favour of an emphasis on the communicative properties of song as an amalgam of words and music: the functions of song and of ordinary language overlap and coalesce in human practices. In place of the polar opposites that characterise nineteenth-century theory, what is proposed is a spectrum account of the language–music relation as an embodied cognitive event: how does human cognition manage the complex territory opened up by the synchronicities of music and language? This cognitive frame rests on the assumption that human activity, however far it reaches beyond the material ecology it arose from, is essentially local and situated. Songs are artefacts, special kinds of cognitive objects which have evolved within given cultural ecologies. Such artefacts are not one-way acts of human ‘intelligence’ doing things to the world, but the material form of an ecological relationship.

Chapter Six highlights the role of ritual in generating and conveying religious knowledge. This perspective is unfolded in the context of three kinds of knowledge related to ritual: embodied, common (shared), and extended knowledge. The chapter explores how these three approaches to ritual knowledge shed light on early Christian baptismal practices. In particular, it draws on the branch of cognitive science dubbed ‘embodied’ or ‘extended’ (‘situated’) cognition. Researchers promoting embodied cognition argue that cognition is fundamentally grounded in bodily actions and in the body interacting with the environment. The chapter develops a hypothesis as to how early Christian baptismal practices accommodated implicit knowledge about power relations. It also shows how extensive symbolic technologies and systems of knowledge grew up around early Christian baptism, including the catechumenate (baptismal teaching), credal formulae and creeds, and stories and pictorial representations, as well as physical structures and architecture.

This chapter begins with identification of paradigmatic shifts in the discourse of cognitive psychology. A ‘person-in-context’ approach is advanced which assumes that culture is a constituent of mind and asserts that knowledge is constructed by the knower. These constructions begin as personal or idiosyncratic. As learners are social beings these constructions are socially shared. In the process, the diversity and incongruence between constructions and the pluralistic nature of knowledge are recognized. People function as a community and move towards a shared understanding. This is a significant ontogenetic process in the life of any learner. Therefore, this ontogeny needs to be reflected in the approaches to pedagogy. The chapter critically analyses current research in the field of cognition and pedagogy and highlights the future directions of research. Also, the implications of this research for the future of education are indicated.

This chapter provides an overview of the content of the present volume, beginning with some background assumptions about the importance of social groups and the influence of culture on group identity, group cognition, and group processes. The mutual relationship between culture and group process is emphasized. On the one hand, groups exist within a cultural context, wherein groups are defined and intragroup and intergroup behavior is regulated. And on the other hand, culture is a group product, an emergent property of the interdependent social exchange and mutual influence that constitutes group process. This bidirectional perspective provides a framework for reviewing the content of the remaining chapters in the book and for outlining an agenda for future research and theory in this domain.

This chapter explores how people “think together” in dyads, small groups, and larger collectives via mutual influence that organizes shared attention and intention, collectively constructs and validates meaning, and collaboratively develops and adjusts distributed networks of learning, memory, and forgetting. It weaves together a selective review of psychological literature on socially shared and situated cognition with applications to the shared and unshared memories of survivors and killers in post-genocide Rwanda. The process and content of convergent and divergent memories about a devastating collective experience helps illuminate the practical psychological functions served by socially shared cognition.

This chapter provides an introduction to the field of cognitive science and outlines the program of a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies. The chapter explains the background and significance of the cognitive turn in psychology and other disciplines and also discusses basic research questions concerning the human mind. The question is raised how the human mind manages a variety of cognitive tasks efficiently, and theories of modularity as well as different accounts of situated cognition are introduced. Following a brief outline of the Cognitive Science of Religion, the final part of the chapter considers what the program of a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies can promise.

This chapter describes an effort to scale up interactive “participatory” learning. It started with design principles that emerged in prior refinements of two conventional online courses. These principles used situative theories of cognition to address enduring challenges of engagement, assessment, grading, and accountability. Fourteen course features were scaled up and automated when one of these courses was reframed as a big (rather than massive) open online course (“BOOC”) offered to hundreds of students. This course was taught once, refined, and offered again, and is currently offered as one of the first self-paced participatory courses. Course features iteratively align learning across public “wikifolios” used to problematize course knowledge, local comments, promotions, and reflections, private open-ended self-assessments, and discreet achievement tests. The chapter argues that scaling of interactive participatory learning (a) be done gradually, (b) employ design-based research methods, (c) focus on productive forms of disciplinary engagement, (d) exploit the unique affordances of public, local, private, and discreet interactions, and (d) employ participatory approaches to assessment. Doing so can deliver the flexibility and efficiency associated with massive self-paced courses as well as the social interaction, disciplinary engagement, and personalization that has heretofore been difficult to accomplish at scale.

To further advance the notion of the diegesis-as-environment and its material-affective nature, this chapter advocates for the atmospheric in cinematic perception. Drawing primarily upon the contemporary interdisciplinary surge of “atmosphere research” (e.g., Schmitz, Böhme, Ingold, Thibaut, and Griffero), this chapter maintains that although the concept of atmosphere has been omnipresent in the literature on film, it has yet to be adequately theoretically addressed. Moreover, what for classical narratology was deemed its conceptual weakness, its intermediate position between the subject (spectator) and object (film), is exactly its media-anthropological strength given that it carves out the anthropomedial space of their coexistence. Abandoned in the textual models of the diegesis, filmic atmospheres resurrect as the quintessential component of the diegesis-as-environment. It is argued that for atmosphere to become a key concept in narratology it needs to challenge the basic internalist assumptions of the contemporary “turn to mood” in (cognitive) film studies. Whereas the concept of “mood” is understood metaphorically as a filter that colors the already constituted narrative world in particular feeling tones, an “atmosphere” is the necessary ground out of which all filmic worlds emerge. Herein lies a new premise for understanding the narrative film: the atmospheric co-constitutes a film’s textual, representational, and propositional dimension rather than being its surplus. In its conclusion, the chapter explores two narrative atmospheric strategies employed by Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice, 2018).

Before students can understand the many ways artists ask us to make sense of their creations, they need to understand how they themselves perceive and think. This essay explores the use of a relational game in teaching our subjective involvement in seeing and resonating with the world. In a reversal of the classic Surrealist objet trouve experiment, participants must go out into the environment not to seek, but to await, an encounter with something that is other, that must be fitted together with our own changing perspectives. Such openness to the intrusion of our surroundings releases the viewer from self-absorption, revealing an independent, yet interdependent, space. This pedagogical game is a pragmatic example of situated cognition. Its phenomenological approach embeds thought in the lived environment. The extensive logic of the game undergirds another perception-enhancing practice. The life-long custom of taking field trips enhances the art of physical and mentally co-producing an always situated reality.

The third chapter turns to gender, examining parts of Cao’s Story of the Stone and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The former treats a boy who strongly identifies himself with the girls with whom he is raised. The latter treats a girl who takes on the disguise of a boy. Both works suggest that personality and behavioral propensities are distributed fairly randomly across the two sexes; at the very least, sex does not align very consistently with such propensities. A careful reading of both works suggests what we might refer to as a “situated” or “situational” conception of gender. A situation triggers some situation category; that is, we class a certain social interaction as a particular type (e.g., a joke or an insult). That categorization includes context-appropriate gender norms. The norms range from diction and politeness through socially appropriate emotions and behaviors (e.g., sadness vs. anger in response to an insult).