1

Scaffolding memory: themes, taxonomies, puzzles

John Sutton, Macquarie University
Email: john.sutton@mq.edu.au URL: http://johnsutton.net/

Forthcoming in Lucas Bietti and Charlie B. Stone (eds), Contextualising Human Memory (Psychology Press).
Version of September 2014.

Abstract
Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding
over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental
psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of
distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of
scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible
criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter
is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and
apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory.

1. Introduction: scaffolding memory

We must learn to remember the particular events and experiences in our past. Infants have capacities to
imitate and repeat, to know what to expect and what usually happens in specific contexts, and to
remember isolated episodes (Bauer 2007). Building on these capacities, young children gradually gain the
ability to locate specific past actions and experiences in time, and to understand them in terms of their
causal, emotional, or narrative relations to other events (Nelson & Fivush 2004). Typically,
autobiographical remembering of this more sophisticated form does not emerge until the child is 4 or 5
years old, and richer forms continue to develop throughout childhood, to such an extent that it can be
seen as a social-cultural skill (Fivush 2011). Longitudinal studies increasingly reveal a range of individual
and cultural differences and trajectories through adolescence and early adulthood in the forms and
contents of the personal narratives that people spontaneously recall when remembering their past
(Markowitsch & Welzer 2009; Reese 2009; Fivush et al 2011; Reese et al 2011).

Like other significant skills, learning to remember the personal past is a challenging and multifaceted
process. The child must keep in mind (and forge links between) objects and events that are no longer
present and, on some views, must come to grasp the structure of time and the temporal asymmetry of
actions and events (Campbell 1997; Hoerl 1999; Sutton 2002). Alongside other components involved in
the development of the sense of self in time (Moore & Lemon 2001; Reese 2002; Howe 2011), social
interaction may be a vital factor in the development of autobiographical memory as parents or caregivers
and children come to achieve together and maintain a form of joint attention to particular past events
(Hoerl & McCormack 2005; Sutton 2007). Because children thus learn to remember in specific dynamic
contexts, developmental psychologists often use the metaphor of ‘scaffolding’ to describe the interactive
support relations involved. In this essay I critically assess the concept of scaffolding as it applies to human
memory, drawing selectively on its applications throughout education and the learning sciences,
developmental psychology, and theories of situated and distributed cognition. After a brief, big-picture
overview of some central uses and definitions of the notion of scaffolding in historical and contemporary
literature, I offer three related taxonomies of forms of scaffolding, seeking to clarify its domains and its
dimensions. In sections 4 and 5 I then pick out two sets of puzzles about or problems for contemporary
accounts of scaffolding in the philosophy and sciences of memory. The chapter is aimed at a broad
interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to
the study of memory. A natural next step would then be the application of these theoretical concerns to
empirical work of various kinds in the field, from ethnographic to experimental contexts.

One helpful initial account of scaffolding comes from Patricia Greenfield, who describes the metaphor as
‘the basis for a theoretical model of the teacher in informal education’ (Greenfield 1984, p.118). Explicitly
anchoring her usage in its source domain, Greenfield suggests that the scaffold
has five characteristics: it provides a support; it functions as a tool; it extends the range of the
worker; it allows the worker to accomplish a task not otherwise possible; and it is used selectively
to aid the worker where needed. (Greenfield 1984, p.118).
 2

In his book Being There, which brought the concept to wider audiences across the cognitive sciences, Andy
Clark identified scaffolding as an external structure used by complex systems like us ‘to mold and
orchestrate behavior’ in adaptive or strategic ways (1997, p.32). In addition to the physical environment,
Clark identified public language and culture as particularly ‘advanced forms of external scaffolding’ by
which humans manage ‘to squeeze maximum coherence and utility from fundamentally short-sighted,
special-purpose, internally fragmented minds’ like ours (p.33): in the picture of our mental lives as hybrid
or distributed processes spread across brain, body, and world which Clark outlined, the intuitive notion of
scaffolding included both social and environmental support, and also the enabling and constraining
presence of, for example, ‘institutions, the inner economy of emotional response, and the various
phenomena relating to group or collective intelligence’ (p.33, p.46, and passim).

These are deliberately broad accounts of ‘scaffolding’. It is natural to ask if they are too inclusive. Roy Pea
begins a helpful historical and conceptual survey by wondering if
the concept of scaffolding has become so broad in its meanings in the field of educational
research and the learning sciences that it has become unclear in its significance. Perhaps the field
has put too much of a burden on the term, and we need a more differentiated ontology to make
progress. Perhaps scaffolding has become a proxy for any cultural practices associated with
advancing performance, knowledge, and skills whether social, material, or reproducible patterns
of interactivity (as in software systems) are involved. This is surely too much complexity to take
on at once. (Pea 2004, p.423; compare Stone 1998)
The small steps towards such a differentiated ontology which I take here do not involve firmly deciding
whether the concept of scaffolding remains merely a metaphor or can be constrained sufficiently to be
itself a useful theoretical term. In lieu of the systematic exercise in historical epistemology which that
project would require, here I suggest only that the concept is still doing productive work across the
disciplines. In particular, some natural problems about the ways it is currently applied have important
implications that are worth considering afresh.

Consider immediate implications from the source domain. Scaffolding is, in general, not itself part of the
building. Rather, it is when operating successfully, merely temporary, to be dispensed with at the
appropriate stage of development. Use of the metaphor thus forces us to be clear about our unit of
analysis. In studying psychological processes like remembering, can we and should we always identify the
single biological organism as the central construction around which scaffolding arises? When we do
justice to the extraordinary diversity and complexity of forms of scaffolding which themselves morph and
shift at many distinctive timescales, what sorts of individuals or embodied minds will we identify there
behind the scaffolds? I suggest that these are apt questions to ask at a time when the need to study
interactivity over time in various kinds of collaborative, joint, or situated contexts or situations has never
been felt so strongly, or its challenges appeared so glaring.

2. Scaffolding: cultural and developmental psychology

In 1976, building on studies of joint visual attention between mothers and infants (Scaife & Bruner 1975),
Jerome Bruner and colleagues described an experiment on joint problem-solving through which they
identified a number of ‘scaffolding functions’ played by a tutor (Wood, Bruner, & Ross 1976). Scaffolding
processes in general, they suggested, involve ‘the adult “controlling” those elements of the task that are
initially beyond the learner’s capacity’: beyond the immediate completion of the task, this process can
over time ‘result, eventually, in development of task competence by the learner at a pace that would far
outstrip his [sic] unassisted efforts’ (1976, p.90). In particular, Wood and colleagues catalogued ways that
tutors scaffold the young problem solvers’ interest and motivation, emotions, attention, and perception of
salience. They can channel the learner’s cognition and action, reducing the available degrees of freedom
or setting specific constraints on task sequencing; focus and direct the child’s pursuit of the activity and
the goal, often through a timely ‘deployment of zest and sympathy’; and also intervene, verbally instruct,
or directly model the requisite action, often in an idealized format (1976, p.98).

Bruner’s interest in both verbal and non-verbal forms of instruction as cognitive technologies owed much
to the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (Boden 2006, p.311). The discovery and creative
reinterpretation of Vygotsky’s work over the second half of the 20th century would be the central part of a
full scholarly history of the idea of scaffolding (see Van der Veer & Valsiner 1992; Wertsch & Tulviste
 3

1992; Bakhurst 2007; Caporael, Griesemer, & Wimsatt 2014). The concept of Vygotsky’s which most
directly fed these movements in developmental psychology and education was the ‘zone of proximal
development’ or ZPD: this is the gap or space between what the learner can do alone, and what she can
achieve ‘under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (Vygotsky 1978, p.86; Cole
1985). Vygotsky had also studied and theorized memory extensively, arguing that more basic memory
capacities are entirely transformed over the course of development by our interactions with external
psychological tools, those ‘mediational means’ by which we appropriate culture as we master the social
practices of employing technologies and artifacts effectively (1978, pp.38-57; Wertsch 1988). Even simple
sociotechnical operations such as tying a knot or marking a stick as a reminder ‘change the psychological
structure of the memory process’ in that they ‘extend the operation of memory beyond the biological
dimensions of the human nervous system and permit it to incorporate artificial, or self-generated, stimuli’
(1978, p. 39; see also Rowlands 1999, Menary 2007). Flourishing multidisciplinary research in the 1980s
and 1990s put such ideas to work in ambitious cross-cultural field studies and innovative theory across
cultural psychology, education, and anthropology. In traditions deeply attentive to the cognitive and
affective effects of power and gender, researchers in these fields came to adopt the labels ‘cultural-
historical activity theory’ and ‘situated cognition’ (Rogoff & Lave 1984; Rogoff 1990, 2003; Chaikin &
Lave 1993; Scribner 1997; Lave 2011). The idea of scaffolding found a particularly productive home in
developmental and lifespan psychology: Katherine Nelson, for example, moved from studies of language
and narrative development towards a social-interactionist approach to autobiographical memory (Nelson
1993). As I described above, on such views discussions about shared past experiences between parent and
child can scaffold joint attention to past events, so that the child gradually comes to think and talk
spontaneously about both personal and shared experiences. Specific features of the interaction sculpt the
form as well as the content of the child’s own developing memory (Reese, Haden, & Fivush 1993; Nelson
& Fivush 2000).

In many respects, through to at least the mid-1990s, these lines of work remained at a distance from the
individualist mainstream in cognitive science, which still tended to treat contextual influences as mere
input or triggers for the real cognitive processing in the head. So both developmental and cultural
psychologists in these traditions, for the most part, remained silent on or hostile to mainstream
computational and representational theories of mind, which were assumed to be irretrievably individualist.
As a result, they did not at that period add to their increasingly mature bodies of empirical work any
extensive accounts of the kinds of cognitive architectures which might be best shaped for incorporating
or intensively coupling with external and social scaffolding. Nor did they typically delineate potential
mechanisms by which the nature and content of interventions by parents and tutors might influence and
enduringly transform the child’s learning and performance in memory and problem solving (Sutton 2002).
Arguably it took the influence of theorists who engaged more overtly and critically with mainstream
cognitive science to begin to bridge these gaps. Edwin Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild (1995) emerged, in
part, out of the meeting of cognitive anthropology with cultural psychology, but critically addressed the
individualist assumptions of computational psychology directly: along with work on the dynamic
development of motor control, Hutchins’ ambitious new vision was a major influence on Clark’s Being
There. By the early years of the 21st century, ideas about embodied and distributed cognition and about
extended mind were more visible across cognitive scientific practice and theory. In the case of memory
research, they aligned with independent movements towards more ecological studies of autobiographical
remembering in context (Michaelian & Sutton 2013). This lightning tour of the recent history of the
contextual study of cognition and memory now sets us up for a more focused analysis of the range and
application of the contemporary concept of scaffolding.

3. Scaffolding: domains and dimensions

Firstly, we can confirm that the picture of scaffolding identified by Bruner and colleagues still clearly
animates increasingly mainstream research on many aspects of cognitive development. In a study of
executive functioning in preschool children, for example, Bibok and colleagues operationalize scaffolding
exactly along the lines suggested by Wood and colleagues (1976): it is ‘the process by which tutors help
plan and organize the activity of children so that they can execute a task that is beyond their current level
of ability’ (Bibok et al 2009, p.18). This is the broad consensus which I seek to explicate more precisely in
what follows, by offering a series of taxonomies of the concept’s domains of application. But first, for
 4

completeness, it is worth briefly mentioning two distinct notions of scaffolding in other recent
psychological literature so as to set them aside for current purposes.

In the context of ‘the scaffolding theory of aging and cognition’ (Goh & Park 2009; Reuter-Lorenz &
Park 2014), scaffolding is a form of neural compensation, specifically ‘the recruitment of additional
circuitry that shores up declining [brain] structures whose functioning has become noisy, inefficient, or
both’ (Park & Reuter-Lorenz 2009, p.183). The use of ‘scaffolding’ in this framework has interesting
relations to the mainstream developmental concept, and raises important questions in its own right: on
another occasion, puzzles related to those I discuss below might productively recur in connection with
the notions of cognitive reserve and compensation in work on aging and memory (Harris et al 2014). In
contrast, a different account of scaffolding has been offered by researchers in the psychology of
automaticity and the ‘new unconscious’: for Williams, Huang, and Bargh, ‘scaffolding’ is ‘the passive,
natural process through which new concepts are formed, especially in early childhood’: distinct
ontogenetic and phylogenetic scaffolding processes link or blend our concepts and goals, ‘tethering’ our
thoughts ‘to the physical environment in which they occur’ (2009, pp.1257-8). Whatever the merits of the
particular version of ‘embodied cognition’ which Williams and colleagues defend, their borrowing of the
concept of ‘scaffolding’ is unhelpful: Niedenthal and Alibali (2009) rightly argue that it should not be
taken to displace the ‘quite different’ and much more active notion of scaffolding available in the
Vygotskyan developmental tradition.

With the relevant notion of scaffolding in mind, we can taxonomise its forms in at least three ways – by
domain, by resource, and by timescale: roughly, by asking in turn what capacity is scaffolded, what is
scaffolding it, and at what rate the resulting learning and transformation occurs. There are of course other
ways to categorize the relevant phenomena, for example by examining variations in the nature of the
learner, and extending the study of the scaffolding of individuals to the case of teams and groups. The
point of all such taxonomies is to seek more differentiated ontologies, or to be in a position then to study
the particular ways the notion might apply in specific contexts. Firstly, while my focus here is on
scaffolding memory, many other cognitive and affective capacities and processes can be supported in
relevantly similar ways. Current research addresses scaffolding, for example, in the development of motor
control, language and narrative abilities, problem-solving, or skills involving executive control such as
planning and attention-switching. This taxonomy by cognitive domain is perhaps the least theoretically
significant: but making it explicit allows us to ask how distinctive forms of scaffolding operate in the
development of such different cognitive processes. It can also remind us that in practice remembering is
rarely isolated or neatly encapsulated, and also to examine its links with forms of scaffolding in other
domains. Memory is involved in various ways, for example, in the operation of the various forms of
‘visual scaffolding’ which can assist design processes such as sketching or modelling in art, graphics, or
architecture (Clark 2005; Murphy 2005; Schmidt et al 2007). Socially- or materially-supported techniques,
strategies, or technologies in such areas of course rely on skilled expert use, which shows up in the ability
swiftly to access appropriate information from long-term memory (Ericsson & Kintsch 1995; Geeves et al
2008). And some of the most important and under-studied forms of scaffolding occur in affective
domains: our moods and emotions are constantly shaped, given precision or flavor, by way of social
uptake, culturally-specific caring practices, or self-induced rituals and habits such as listening to music,
going to a particular place, or just having another coffee (Griffiths & Scarantino 2009; Greenwood 2013;
Colombetti & Krueger 2015). Such scaffolded forms of emotion regulation also involve memory of
various kinds, including embodied memories of action as well as explicit autobiographical memories
(Sutton & Williamson 2014).

A second way to taxonomise forms of scaffolding is to look at its agents or mediators, at the particular
kinds of construction which support growth and development. Vygotsky rightly sought to look at social
and material or technical forms of scaffolding together, and as our modern disciplines catch up with the
possibilities for interaction studies we need to knit these projects together again (Enfield & Levinson
2006; Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron 2011). At the broadest level, we can distinguish scaffolding by other
people and scaffolding by the inanimate world (Sutton 2006): but each category of course includes, at a
finer grain, a range of quite distinct resources which can extend, assist, and transform cognitive and
memory capacities.
 5

Social scaffolding, first, includes parent-child or caregiver-child interaction: but even within families, the
relevant support often spreads across siblings and across generations (Halbwachs 1950/ 1980; Bohanek et
al 2006; Shore 2009, Miller & Fung 2012). The category of collaborative remembering includes many
cases beyond the more asymmetric adult-child contexts typically studied in developmental psychology:
friends and couples, work colleagues and team-mates, people with shared enthusiasms or experiences
constantly exchange and renegotiate the meanings of past events (Sutton 2008a; Barnier et al 2008).

But because people share memories in specific contexts, secondly, we need to address the worldly aspects
of the interconnected systems which compose ecologies of remembering. These include natural
environmental resources such as the regularities of the physical world, the geographical and ecological
structures of space and place, and of landscape and architecture, and the material properties of objects
(Ingold 2000). Together such ecological resources can form unique topographies of remembrance for
particular communities (Basso 1996; White 2009; Wood 2013). Over the last 100 thousand years or so, as
a species we have also increasingly relied on more sophisticated and varied artifacts and technologies
which we construct and recruit for cognitive, mnemonic, and social purposes (Donald 1990; Malafouris
2013). The capacity more reliably to transmit complex skills such as those required for making and
deploying a flexible array of technologies was a central development in the evolution of cognition,
occurring not because of any dramatic changes in our neural resources but because of gradual,
interconnected changes in the structures of our environments and the organization of our social life
(Sterelny 2012; Sutton 2013). Apprenticeship in skilled, characteristically human expert activities was and
remains a hybrid process involving both supervised and unsupervised learning regimes, both direct
instruction and the gradual pickup of lore, both formal demonstration and playful trial-and-error
experiment (Sterelny 2012). The properties of linguistic and other tags and labels offer us further
capacities, when necessary, to stabilize our thoughts and tools, and to collectively reflect on and improve
our props and scaffolds, sharing or negotiating ideas and narrating possibilities, linking current concerns
to events long in the past or plans for increasingly distant futures (Clark 1996, 1998; Jackendoff 1996;
Sutton 2002). As cultural and institutional scaffolding systems expand, with an exponentially increasing
array of larger, more hybrid social forms involving distinctive distributions of labour and of cognitive
profile, we then create vast and interconnected forms of organizational scaffolding within which a range
of distinct coordination practices emerge (Christensen 2013; Gordon & Theiner 2015). Finally, many
resources to support memory and cognition which start out as external or technological can be
transformed into internalized systems of self-scaffolding. We co-opt architectures and strategies from the
external world which then allow us to carry out tasks without present assistance, or to learn to learn better
(Vygotsky 1978; Clark 1997, 1998; Bickhard 2005; Mascolo 2005; Sutton 2006, 2010). As I discuss further
below, it may then look like the scaffolding has been wholly dismantled as the individual operates unaided
when, in fact, it has become internalized.

Note that even in listing these varied resources, it is clear that the scaffolding for cognition and memory
does not come in neatly separable natural and cultural forms. Rather, both individually and collectively we
create or at least mould many of the most significant features of the world on which we then rely: as a
species, we have long adopted and adapted all kinds of natural resources which are thereby transformed
as we incorporate them into our cognitive and social systems and practices (Clark 2003; Sutton 2008b).
As Andy Clark puts it, we humans create whole cascades of props and ‘surrogate situations’ which allow
us to ‘routinely exceed the apparent limits of our basic modes of animal reason’: these systems of
‘technological and cultural props and scaffolds’ can be seen as ‘extended cognitive physiologies’ reaching
far ‘beyond the flesh’ (2005, pp.241-2). Typically we now remember past events, or simply re-enact well-
remembered practices, in settings which inextricably link social, ecological, and technical resources
alongside our neural and bodily capacities. The arrangements of utensils and environmental supports for
cooking, for example, involves both ‘the intelligent use of space’ (Kirsh 1995) and complex, socially- and
culturally-embedded practices for working together with other people (D. Sutton 2006). Likewise, when
long-married couples remember their first meetings or the holidays they have taken together, or employ
their shared memory skills to remember when and where they should be in daily life, they typically rely on
a range of artifacts – diaries, notes, or new digital technologies – to support their collaborative recall
(Harris et al. 2014).
 6

Having sketched taxonomies of the domains in which scaffolding operates, the forms it takes, and the
resources it involves, we can finally point to the range of timescales on which these processes operate
(compare Gauvain 2005; van Geert & Steenbeek 2005). We have already seen that scaffoldings for
memory and cognition developed over an evolutionary or phylogenetic timescale, as we collectively
constructed unique kinds of cognitive niches (see also Menary 2014, Wimsatt 2014). Then there are a
range of cultural-historical timeframes, as addressed by both archaeologists and historians, within which
certain variations and developments in technology and institutional practices are themselves best seen as
changes in human memory, rather than merely external influences on basic or constant internal cognitive
processes (Smail 2008; Sutton 2010; Tribble & Keene 2011; Sutton & Keene forthcoming). Next, at the
ontogenetic timescale, the central place of scaffolding in the child’s development of the abilities to
remember, imagine, and plan has been discussed above. These processes do not stop when childhood
ends, and as I will argue further below scaffolding should be seen in the context of the lifespan. Finally, at
more compressed timescales, much cognitive scientific practice is devoted to the study of richly
interactive systems of scaffolding at the timescale of occurrent cognitive processes, as the interanimating
array of resources I have just sketched takes unique forms to shape the content and form of specific cases
of remembering.

A science of the scaffolded mind (Sterelny 2010) will operate across all of these levels, types, and
timescales of scaffolding, identifying the key dimensions of variation in the ways that they relate and
interact in distinctive contexts for specific tasks. With this framework in mind, I move on to address, in
Sections 4 and 5 in turn, two related puzzles about the way that the notion of scaffolding is deployed in
contemporary memory theory.

4. Puzzle #1. Must Scaffolding Fade? Internalization and Individualism

Because discussions of scaffolding have been anchored in developmental psychology, there has naturally
been a focus on what Vygotsky saw as ‘the distinguishing feature of human psychology’: ‘the
internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities’ (1978, p.57). What must first be
achieved interpersonally, as a child plays or works with an adult, or employs a culturally-embedded sign or
tool, is reconstructed and ‘transformed into an intrapersonal’ process. After being unable to walk unaided,
the child takes her first steps alone; after long needing adult assistance to read, she will one day manage to
do so on her own; after talking about today’s shared events, she will later come spontaneously to recall
her past experiences in narrative sequence. Cognitive functions thus appear ‘first, on the social level, and
later, on the individual level’ (p.57). Vygotsky himself was clear that these processes of internalization are
complex and gradual, and that the external form of activity often continues or ‘lasts forever.’ But there is
a temptation, in noting the pervasive nature of internalization in development, to think of scaffolding as
temporary, and the developmental notion of ‘fading’ sometimes encourages us to think in terms of
interpersonal capacities being at some stage transferred complete, once and for all, into the learner’s head.
For example, Collins, Brown, and Newman argue that
Once the learner has a grasp of the target skill, the master reduces (or fades) his [sic] participation,
providing only limited hints, refinements, and feedback to the learner, who practices successively
approximating smooth execution of the skill (1989, p.456)

Discussing this use of the term ‘fading’, Roy Pea goes so far as to say that ‘such a dismantling mechanism’
is ‘an intrinsic component of the scaffolding framework’ (2004, p.431). His reasoning is that if a scaffold
does not fade in this way, there would be no clear distinction between scaffolding and the ‘much more
pervasive form of cognitive support’ that enables distributed cognition or distributed intelligence.
Wondering whether a calculator which remains a fixed component of problem-solving activity can still be
called a scaffold, Pea suggests that we need to distinguish the many activities enabled by new technologies
which simply could not be performed without ongoing computing support from the kind of scaffolding
that occurs in educational interactions between teacher and learner. Some forms of cognitive support are
‘scaffolds-with-fading to be pulled down and whisked away once the learner is able to perform as
expected without their use’, whereas others ‘serve in an ongoing way as part of a distributed intelligence
scientific workbench and as fundamental aides to the doing of science whose fading is unnecessary and
unproductive’ (2004, p.442). These are interesting suggestions, but I will argue that we do not need the
sharp distinctions towards which Pea is working here: neither between social scaffolding and
 7

technological scaffolding, nor between tasks that require ongoing support and those which do not, nor at
a theoretical level between scaffolding and distributed cognition.

The danger of enforcing such sharp distinctions and, in particular, of taking the fading or dismantling of
scaffolding to be essential, is that we end up with what might be called a deficit model of scaffolding in
which scaffolds are only or primarily needed and used when there is something missing in the learner. On
that picture, external resources are required when or as long there is something lacking in the basic natural
capacities, when the unsupported or naked system cannot perform specific activities, perhaps because the
autonomous capacity has not yet developed, or because of some temporary obstacle or damage, or (at the
other end of the lifespan, for example) because of irremediable decline. Certainly, on some occasions and
in some contexts individuals perform tasks alone. In the case of memory, we are all aware of the richly
sensory, emotionally significant, often viscerally engaging phenomenology of remembering, which can
occur out of the blue in ways that do not seem to have a specific environmental trigger (Berntsen 2009).
Some people are perhaps relatively more ‘shielded’, as we might say, from current stimuli and from social
or ecological scaffolding, and in many contexts will pursue their own train of thought or focus on a path
of deliberate recollection quite independently. Their cognitive capacities of course developed in specific
contexts, but the impact of the developmental trajectory may be quite idiosyncratic. Yet no mature human
memory system operates in isolation, and it is more productive for explanatory purposes to think not of a
sharp distinction, but of a continuum between cases where scaffolding has been wholly dismantled and
cases where forms of scaffolding remain actively integrated into ongoing processing. Or rather, cases of
remembering may differ from each other in many distinctive ways, along many distinct dimensions. The
nature of the scaffolding may differ, involving unique balances of social, technological, and environmental
support. Variations in the mode and intensity of instruction shape the pace and nature of learning.
Support may differ in its duration, forming more fleeting or more enduring systems, and in its reliability
and the level or nature of trust invested in it. It may be more or less easy to adapt to and use certain
forms of scaffolding in certain contexts, with some well-entrenched resources being fully integrated into a
well-practised set of cognitive activities, while others remain more opaque in use and require more explicit
attention. By locating specific cases in this kind of multidimensional space, we can turn an unproductive
dispute about the boundary between scaffolding and distributed cognition into an empirically tractable set
of projects, describing and exploring the characteristic features and patterns of different kinds of
scaffolded systems (Wilson & Clark 2009; Sterelny 2010; Sutton et al 2010; Heersmink 2014).

From this alternative point of view, an exclusive focus on the fading of supports may then appear, as Pea
later suspects, ‘as a somewhat Puritanical concept’ that is inappropriate not only ‘for modern times’ ( Pea
2004, p.443) but for any full account of human cognition and memory. Looking for the independent
autonomous agent behind the scaffolding would be a residue of individualism. In contrast, analyses of
scaffolding can be productively allied (rather than contrasted) with work in the distributed cognition
framework, in which mind and memory remain hybrid across the lifespan (Sutton 2014). Just as there is
often a building or edifice that scaffolding supports, and which can be identified to some extent by its
physical boundaries, so there is a biological entity, the organism, with its own characteristic patterns of
activity which remain central across many distinctive interactions: but while the organism’s brain traces
one clearly located spatiotemporal path, its mind is not bound within the skull.

A person who continues to need and employ scaffolding is not thereby incomplete or deficient, although
of course there are characteristic trajectories and transformations in the nature and use of distinct
supporting resources over the lifespan. An initial reading of the developmental literature on
autobiographical memory which I summarized earlier might suggest that once discussion about the past
between parent and child has given the child the capacity spontaneously to recall events in the personal
past, the interactive scaffolding comes to an end. This is not the right lesson: instead, we should see adult
memory capacities and processes too as not only enabled by the mechanisms of our neural systems but
also fundamentally entangled with and reliant on social, environmental, and cultural resources.

To sum up, it is true that certain forms of scaffolding are sometimes dismantled, for certain individual
learners or groups, and for certain tasks. But such fading or dismantling is a cultural and/or individual
achievement rather than the revelation of our deepest, most basic or primitive cognitive capacities. For
the sciences of mind there is no reason to think that the essential level of analysis should be the
 8

performance of the naked brain or the unscaffolded mind. Rather, human psychology is most
characteristically seen and experienced in our tangled, dynamic interrelations with social, environmental,
and technological systems. Instead of stripping away the scaffolding and the multiple influences in search
of something pristine beneath, the explanatory task is to document and trace the many forms of
scaffolding and the shifting cognitive constructions they support.

5. Puzzle #2. The Cultural Politics of Elaboration

Examining potential implications of the concept of scaffolding, I have suggested that the natural or
biological capacities which underlie our rich mental lives are, in the case of human psychology, already
thoroughly scaffolded and culturally-mediated. In modern Western society, we can easily over-invest in
more extreme ideals by which self-sufficient and relatively detached individual minds are the norm: we
can push this thought further by wondering whether the ideal of autonomous remembering by a solitary
agent is something of a culturally specific liberal imposition, one result of the fact that most research in
scientific psychology is done both with Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic or WEIRD
subjects and participants (Henrich et al 2010). Other attitudes to and practices of cultural scaffolding for
remembering, involving different attitudes to biographical coherence and to the centrality of the
autonomous self, are possible and have been studied in detail in outstanding cross-cultural research
(Leichtman et al 2003; Reese 2013; Wang 2013).

This very abstract concern can be put to work in a concrete research context. A key distinction in
developmental work on parental scaffolding of children’s memory is that between more elaborative or
generative interaction, when parents talk about the past more richly and emotionally, and more repetitive,
directive, or pragmatic interaction in which parents for example simply continue to seek a particular fact
from the child (Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993). ‘Elaborative’ talk about the past on the part of parents –
which, in most studies, both mothers and fathers tend to engage in with girls more than with boys – is in
turn associated with earlier and richer spontaneous autobiographical remembering on the part of the child
(Fivush 1994). This robust result is just one achievement of the social-interactionist tradition which, as
noted above, sees the emergence of autobiographical memory as ‘the outcome of a social cultural
cognitive system, wherein different components are being opened to experiences over time, wherein
experiences vary over time and context, and wherein individual histories determine how social and
cognitive sources are combined in varying ways” (Nelson & Fivush 2004, p.487). Cultural as well as
gender differences have been carefully tracked in these interactions: for example, Caucasian American
children’s spontaneous memories highlight the self more, in general, than do those of Korean children
(Mullen & Yi, 1995).

There are conceptual connections here to our first puzzle about the implications of the concept of
scaffolding. It may appear as if these results suggest that parental reminiscence style is the primary driving
force behind the emergence of autobiographical memory, in that the structure and content of the child’s
early thought and talk about the past is provided to a large degree by adults, whose communicative
actions simply form the scaffolding for such early memories. Perhaps the scaffolding metaphor itself
encourages the thought that the direction of influence is one-way, from social and narrative context to the
child’s autobiographical memory capacities. But this may be a misleading interpretation of the results.
Interactions coded as elaborative in this research perhaps include at least two distinct kinds. Sometimes
the parent is primarily just offering or even imposing detail and vivid content about a particular aspect of
the past event. But this is a distinct phenomenon from the related feature of contingency in conversation;
a contingent utterance is related in content to the conversational partner’s prior utterance, whereas some
elaborations may not be directly relevant to the specific conversational context and thus not genuinely
dialogical (Petra, Benga, & Ţincaş, 2005). A better metaphor to catch the reciprocal and dynamic nature
of these interactions might be that of a spiral process, in which the child’s changing competence in
dialogue about the past itself in turn directly influences the parent’s reminiscence style, encouraging the
dynamic co-construction of richer narratives (Haden, Haine, & Fivush 1997). It is as yet unclear how
much the appropriate timing of responses and turns matters in comparison with matching or linkage of
appropriate content between parent and child. If contingency of response is a distinctive factor in
scaffolding the child’s capacities, artificial agents might be a useful comparison. We want to allow for
mutual influence between child and parent or between building and scaffold, in which a dynamic co-
construction of memories involves an active child or learner. Again, there is an empirical spectrum of
 9

possibilities here, since the relative influence of multiple concurrent processes can vary across cases cases
(cf. Griffiths & Stotz 2000; Sutton 2009). Both individual and cultural differences are now being teased
out in longitudinal research on memory development over time by many leading researchers in these
areas. The nature of emotional interaction within collaborative memory will vary across cultures: while we
know that trust and attachment are vital mediating factors, there is, as yet, little research connecting non-
verbal and paralinguistic interaction between parent and child with the analysis of conversations about the
past (Larkina & Bauer 2010).

To conclude, I have not suggested that we should jettison the metaphor of scaffolding, despite certain
problematic tendencies or potential misinterpretations of its standard uses in the sciences of learning and
memory. Rather, I have argued that sensitivity to the historical background of the concept can assist us in
developing and sustaining rich, mixed-method studies of the diverse resources involved in most real-life
practices of remembering. Integrating the methods of experimental psychology with immersive
ethnographic projects, seeking to bridge the gaps between the lab and the rest of the sociocultural world
from both ends at once, we can imagine research projects which address the interactions of distinct forms
and timescales of scaffolding all at once.
 10

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the editors for their support and for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft. I
presented talks on this topic at our Macquarie University Memory Day in November 2012, and in a
symposium ‘Scaffolding Memory Across the Lifespan’ organized by Amanda Barnier and Suparna
Rajaram at SARMAC X, the 10th conference of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and
Cognition, at Rotterdam in June 2013. Many thanks to the organizers and audiences at those events, and
for particularly helpful feedback or suggestions to David Bakhurst, Patricia Bauer, Adam Congleton,
Robyn Fivush, Tilmann Habermas, Doris McIlwain, Elaine Reese, Karen Salmon, and Penny van Bergen.
Puzzles about the implications of the metaphor of scaffolding were put to me effectively and productively
by Eve Keller years ago at Chapel Hill. All my thinking on the psychology of social memory is informed
by my long-term collaboration with Amanda Barnier and Celia Harris in our collective cognition research
group.

References
Bakhurst, D. 2007. Vygotsky’s Demons. In H. Daniels, M. Cole, & J.V. Wertsch (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Vygotsky (pp.50-76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barnier, A.J., Sutton, J., Harris, C.B., and Wilson, R.A. 2008. A conceptual and empirical framework for
the social distribution of cognition: the case of memory. Cognitive Systems Research, 9 (1), 33-51.
Bauer, P.J. 2007. Remembering the Times of our Lives: memory in infancy and beyond. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque,
NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Berntsen, D. 2009. Involuntary Memories: an introduction to the unbidden past. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bibok, M.B., Carpendale, J.I.M., and Müller, U. 2009. Parental scaffolding and the development of
executive function. New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development, 123, 17-34.
Bickhard, M.H. 2005. Functional scaffolding and self-scaffolding. New Ideas in Psychology, 23, 166-173.
Boden, M. 2006. Mind as Machine: a history of cognitive science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bohanek, J. G., Marin, K. A., Fivush, R., & Duke, M. P. (2006). Family narrative interaction and
children’s sense of self. Family Process, 45(1), 39–54.
Campbell, J. 1997. The structure of time in autobiographical memory. European Journal of Philosophy, 5, 105-
118.
Caporael, L.R., Griesemer, J.R., and Wimsatt, W.C. 2014. Developing scaffolds: an introduction. In L.R.
Caporael, J.R. Griesemer, and W.C. Wimsatt (eds), Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition
(pp.1-20). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chaikin, S. and Lave, J. (eds). 1993. Understanding Practice: perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Christensen, L.R. 2013. Stigmergy in human practice: coordination in construction work. Cognitive Systems
Research, 21, 40-51.
Clark, A. 1996. Linguistic anchors in the sea of thought. Pragmatics and Cognition, 4 (1), 93-103.
Clark, A. 1997. Being There: putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. 1998. Magic words: how language augments human computation. In P. Carruthers & J. Boucher
(eds), Language and Thought: interdisciplinary Themes (pp.162-183). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. 2005. Beyond the flesh: some lessons from a mole cricket. Artificial Life, 11, 233-244.
Cole, M. 1985. The zone of proximal development: where culture and cognition create each other. In J.V.
Wertsch (ed), Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian perspectives (pp.146-161). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Collins, J.S., Brown, A. and Newman, S.E. 1989. Cognitive apprenticeship: teaching the crafts of reading,
writing, and mathematics. In L.B. Resnick, Knowing, Learning, and Instruction (pp.453-494). Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Colombetti, G. and Krueger, J. 2015. Scaffoldings of the affective mind. Philosophical Psychology.
Donald, M. 1990. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Enfield, N. and Levinson, S.C. (eds) 2006. Roots of Human Sociality: culture, cognition, and interaction. Oxford:
Berg.
Ericsson, K.A. and Kintsch, W. 1995. Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102 (2), 211-245.
 11

Fivush, R. 1994. Constructing narrative, emotion, and self in parent-child conversations about the past. In
U. Neisser & R. Fivush (eds.), The Remembering Self (pp. 136-157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fivush, R. 2011. The development of autobiographical memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 559-582.
Fivush, R., Habermas, T., Waters, T.E.A., and Zaman, W. 2011. The making of autobiographical
memory: intersections of culture, narratives and identity. International Journal of Psychology, 46 (5), 321-345.
Gauvain, M. 2005. Scaffolding in socialization. New Ideas in Psychology, 23, 129-139.
Geeves, A., Christensen, W., Sutton, J., and McIlwain, D.J.F. 2008. Critical review of Chaffin, Imreh, and
Crawford, Practicing Perfection: memory and piano performance. Empirical Musicology Review, 3 (3), 163-172.
Goh, J.O. and Park, D.C. 2009. Neuroplasticity and cognitive aging: the scaffolding theory of aging and
cognition. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 27, 391-403.
Gordon, B.R. and Theiner, G. 2015. Scaffolded joint action as a micro-foundation of organizational
learning. In C.B. Stone and L.M. Bietti (eds), Contextualizing Human Memory. London: Psychology Press.
Greenfield, P.M. 1984. A theory of the teacher in the learning activities of everyday life. In B. Rogoff and
J. Lave (eds), Everyday Cognition: its development in social context (pp.117-138). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Greenwood, J. 2013. Contingent transcranialism and deep functional cognitive integration: the case of
human emotional ontogenesis. Philosophical Psychology, 26 (3), 420-436.
Griffiths, P.E. and Scarantino, A. 2009. Emotions in the wild. In P. Robbins & M. Aydede, The Cambridge
Handbook of Situated Cognition (pp.437-453). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Griffiths, P.E. and Stotz, K. 2000. How the mind grows: a developmental perspective on the biology of
cognition. Synthese, 122, 29–51.
Haden, C.A., Haine, R.A., & Fivush, R. 1997. Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing
across the preschool years. Developmental Psychology, 33, 295–307.
Halbwachs, M. 1950/ 1980. The Collective Memory. (F.J. Ditter & V.Y. Ditter, Trans.). New York: Harper
and Row.
Harris, C.B. Barnier, A.J., Sutton, J. and Keil, P.C. 2014. Couples as socially distributed cognitive systems:
remembering in everyday social and material contexts. Memory Studies 7 (3), 285-297.
Heersmink, R. 2014. Dimensions of integration in embedded and extended cognitive systems.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Henrich, J., Heine, S.J., and Norenzayan, A. 2010. The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 33 (2-3), 61-83.
Hoerl, C. 1999. Memory, amnesia, and the past. Mind & Language, 14, 227-251.
Hoerl, C. and McCormack, T. 2005. Joint reminiscing as joint attention to the past. In N. Eilan, C. Hoerl,
T. McCormack, & J. Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention, Communication, and Other Minds: issues in philosophy and
psychology (pp. 260–286). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howe, M. 2011. The Nature of Early Memory: an adaptive theory of the genesis and development of memory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.
Jackendoff, R. 1996. How language helps us think. Pragmatics and Cognition, 4 (1), 1-34.
Kirsh D. 1995. The intelligent use of space. Artificial Intelligence, 73, 31-68.
Larkina, M. and Bauer, P. 2010. The role of maternal verbal, affective, and behavioral support in
preschool children’s independent and collaborative autobiographical memory reports. Cognitive
Development, 25 (4), 309-324.
Lave, J. 2011. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leichtman, M., Wang, Q., and Pillemer, D. 2003. Cultural variations in interdependence and
autobiographical memory: lessons from Korea, China, India, and the United States. In R. Fivush & C.
Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: developmental and cultural
perspectives (pp.73-98). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Malafouris, L. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind: a theory of material engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Markowitsch, H. and Welzer, H. 2009. The Development of Autobiographical Memory. London: Psychology
Press.
Mascolo, M.F. 2005. Change processes in development: the concept of coactive scaffolding. New Ideas in
Psychology, 23, 185-196.
Menary, R. 2007. Cognitive Integration: mind and cognition unbounded. London: Palgrave.
Menary, R. 2014. Neural plasticity, neuronal recycling, and niche construction. Mind & Language, 29 (3),
286-303.
 12

Michaelian, K. and Sutton, J. 2013. Distributed cognition and memory research: history and current
directions. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4 (1), 1-24.
Miller, P.J. and Fung, H. 2012. How socialization happens on the ground: narrative practices as alternate
socializing pathways in Taiwanese and European-American families. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development, 77 (1), 1-140.
Moore, C. and Lemon, K. 2001. The Self in Time: developmental perspectives. London: Psychology Press.
Mullen, M. K., & Yi, S. 1995. The cultural context of talk about the past: implications for the
development of autobiographical memory. Cognitive Development, 10, 407-419.
Murphy, K.M. 2005. Collaborative imagining: the interactive use of gestures, talk, and graphic
representation in architectural practice. Semiotica, 156, 113-145.
Nelson, K. 1993. The psychological and social origins of autobiographical memory. Psychological
Science, 4 (1), 7-14.
Nelson, K. and Fivush, R. 2000. Socialization of memory. In E. Tulving & F.I.M. Craik (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Memory (pp. 283-295). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, K. and Fivush, R. 2004. The emergence of autobiographical memory: a social cultural
developmental theory. Psychological Review, 111, 486-511.
Niedenthal, P.M. and Alibali, M.W. 2009. Conceptualizing scaffolding and goals for a full account of
embodied cognition. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 1268-1271.
Park, D.C. and Reuter-Lorenz, P. 2009. The adaptive brain: aging and neurocognitive scaffolding. Annual
Review of Psychology, 60, 173-196.
Pea, R.D. 2004. The social and technological dimensions of scaffolding and related theoretical concepts
for learning, education, and human activity. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13 (3), 423-451.
Petra, L., Benga, O., and Ţincaş, I. 2005. A dynamic approach to the co-construction of autobiographical
memory: insights from dyadic conversations about the past. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society. URL: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2005/docs/p1732.pdf
Reese, E. 2002. A model of the origins of autobiographical memory. In J.W. Fagen & H. Hayne (eds.),
Progress in infancy research (Vol. 2, pp. 215-260). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Reese, E. 2009. The development of autobiographical memory: origins and consequences. Advances in
Child Development and Behavior, 37, 145-200.
Reese, E., Haden, C.A., Baker-Ward, L., Bauer, P.J., Fivush, R., and Ornstein, P.A. 2011. Coherence of
personal narratives across the lifespan: a multidimensional model and coding method. Journal of
Cognition and Development, 12 (4), 424-462.
Reese, E. 2013. Tell Me A Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reese, E., Haden, C.A., and Fivush, R. 1993. Mother-child conversations about the past: relationships of
style and memory over time. Cognitive Development, 8, 403-430.
Reuter-Lorenz, P.A. and Park, D.C. 2014. How does it STAC up? Revisiting the scaffolding theory of
aging and cognition. Neuropsychology Review, 24, 355-370.
Rogoff, B. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking: cognitive development in social context. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Rogoff, B. 2003. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rowlands, M. 1999. The Body in Mind: understanding cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Scaife, M. and Bruner, J.S. 1975. Capacity for joint visual attention in the infant. Nature, 253, 265-266.
Schmidt, R., Isenberg, T., Jepp, P., Singh, K., and Wyvill, B. 2007. Sketching, scaffolding, and inking: a
visual history for interactive 3D modelling. International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and
Rendering. URL: http://www.unknownroad.com/publications/ScaffoldingNPAR07.pdf
Scribner, S. 1997. Mind and Social Practice: selected writings of Sylvia Scribner. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Shore, B. 2009. Making time for family: schemas for long-term family memory. Social Indicators Research,
93, 95-103.
Smail, D.L. 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press
Sterelny, K. 2010. Minds: extended or scaffolded? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9 (4), 465-481.
Sterelny, K. 2012. The Evolved Apprentice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stone, C.A. 1998. The metaphor of scaffolding: its utility for the field of learning disabilities. Journal of
Learning Disabilities, 31 (4), 344-364.
 13

Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. & LeBaron, C. (eds) 2011. Embodied Interaction: language and body in the material
world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, D. 2006. Cooking skill, the senses, and memory: the fate of practical knowledge. In C. Gosden, E.
Edwards & R. Phillips (eds) Sensible Objects: colonialism, museums and material culture (pp. 87-118). Oxford:
Berg.
Sutton, J. 2002. Cognitive conceptions of language and the development of autobiographical memory.
Language & Communication, 22, 375-390.
Sutton, J. 2006. Distributed cognition: domains and dimensions. Pragmatics and Cognition, 14, 235-247.
Sutton, J. 2007. Integrating the philosophy and psychology of memory: two case studies. In M. de Caro,
F. Ferretti, & M. Marraffa (Eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: philosophy and psychology in intersection (pp. 81-92).
Berlin: Springer.
Sutton, J. 2008a. Between individual and collective memory: coordination, interaction, distribution. Social
Research 75 (1), 23-48.
Sutton, J. 2008b. Material agency, skills, and history: distributed cognition and the archaeology of
memory. In Lambros Malafouris & Carl Knappett (Eds.), Material Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric
approach.(pp.37-55). Berlin: Springer.
Sutton, J. 2009. Remembering. In Murat Aydede & Phillip Robbins (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of
Situated Cognition (pp.217-235) .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, J. 2010. Exograms and interdisciplinarity: history, the extended mind, and the civilizing process.
In Richard Menary (Ed.), The Extended Mind (pp.189-225). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Sutton, J. 2013. Skill and collaboration in the evolution of human cognition. Biological Theory 8 (1), 28-36.
Sutton, J. 2014. Remembering as public practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive
ecologies. In D. Moyal-Sharrock, A. Coliva, & V. Munz (eds), Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein
Symposium.
Sutton, J., Harris, C.B., Keil, P.G., and Barnier, A.J. 2010. The psychology of memory, extended
cognition, and socially distributed remembering. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9 (4), 521-560.
Sutton, J. and Keene, N. forthcoming. Cognitive history and material culture. In D. Gaimster, T.
Hamling, & C. Richardson (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Material Culture in Early Modern Europe.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Sutton, J. and Williamson, K. 2014. Embodied remembering. In Lawrence Shapiro (ed), The Routledge
Handbook of Embodied Cognition (pp.315-325). London: Routledge.
Tribble, E.B. and Keene, N. 2011. Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering: religion, education, and
memory in early modern England. London: Palgrave
Van der Veer, R. and Valsiner, J. 1992 Understanding Vygotsky: a quest for synthesis. Wiley-Blackwell.
Van Geert, P. and Steenbeck, H. 2005. The dynamics of scaffolding. New Ideas in Psychology, 23, 115-128.
Vygotsky, L.S. 1978. Mind in Society: the development of higher psychological processes. Translated by M. Cole.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wang, Q. 2013. The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wertsch, J.V. 1988. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, J.V. and Tulviste, P. 1992. L.S. Vygotsky and contemporary developmental psychology.
Developmental Psychology, 28 (4), 548-557.
Whyte, N. 2009. Inhabiting the Landscape: place, custom and memory, 1500-1800. Oxford: Oxbow.
Williams, L.E., Huang, J.Y., and Bargh, J.A. 2009. The scaffolded mind: higher mental processes are
grounded in early experience of the physical world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 1257-1267.
Wilson, R.A. and Clark, A. 2009. How to situate cognition: letting nature take its course. In Murat Aydede
& Phillip Robbins (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (pp.55-77). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wimsatt, W.C. 2014. Entrenchment and scaffolding: an architecture for a theory of cultural change. In
L.R. Caporael, J.R. Griesemer, and W.C. Wimsatt (eds), Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and
Cognition (pp.77-105). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wood, A. 2013. The Memory of the People: custom and popular senses of the past in early modern England.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wood, D., Bruner, J.S., and Ross, G. 1976. The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89-100.