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My first 30-odd years of research in cognitive science has been driven by an attempt to balance two facts about human thought that seem incompatible and two corresponding ways of understanding information processing. The facts are that, on one hand, human memories serve as sophisticated pattern recognition devices with great flexibility and an ability to generalize and predict as long as circumstances remain sufficiently familiar. On the other hand, we are capable of deploying an enormous variety of representational schemes that map closely onto articulable structure in the world and that support explanation even in unfamiliar circumstances. The contrasting ways of modeling such processes involve, first, more and more sophisticated associative models that capture progressively higher-order statistical structure and, second, more powerful representational languages for other sorts of structure, especially compositional and causal structure. My efforts to rectify these forces have taken me from the study of memory to induction and category knowledge to causal reasoning. In the process, I have consistently appealed to dual systems of thinking. I have come to realize that a key reason for our success as cognizers is that we rely on others for most of our information processing needs; we live in a community of knowledge. We make use of others both intuitively-by outsourcing much of our thinking without knowing we are doing it-and by deliberating with others., (© 2021 Cognitive Science Society LLC.)

The community-of-knowledge framework explains the extraordinary success of the human species, despite individual members' demonstrably shallow understanding of many topics, by appealing to outsourcing. People follow the cues of members of their community because understanding of phenomena is generally distributed across the group. Typically, communities do possess the relevant knowledge, but it is possible in principle for communities to send cues despite lacking knowledge—a weakness in the system's design. COVID-19 in the United States offered a natural experiment in collective-knowledge development because a novel phenomenon arrived at a moment of intense division in political partisanship. We review evidence from the pandemic showing that the thought leaders of the two partisan groups sent radically different messages about COVID, which were, in turn, reinforced by close community members (family, friends, etc.). We show that although actual understanding of the individual plays a role in a key COVID-mitigation behavior (vaccination), it plays a smaller role than perceived understanding of thought leaders and beliefs about COVID-related behaviors of close community members. We discuss implications for theory and practice when all communities are in the same epistemic circumstance—relying on the testimony of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive neuroscience seeks to discover the biological foundations of the human mind. One goal is to explain how mental operations are generated by the information processing architecture of the human brain. Our aim is to assess whether this is a well-defined objective. Our contention will be that it is not because the information processing of any given individual is not contained entirely within that individual's brain. Rather, it typically includes components situated in the heads of others, in addition to being distributed across parts of the individual's body and physical environment. Our focus here will be on cognition distributed across individuals, or on what we call the "community of knowledge," the challenge that poses for reduction of cognition to neurobiology and the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to the study of communal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]