The role of the context in the acquisition and in the organisation of knowledge: Studies from adults and from children

Abstract

For a few years, partisans of two theoretical approaches have debated about the role attributed to the context concept in the acquisition and the organization of knowledge. The first one is the symbolic information processing system which focuses on the symbolic structures of the mind. The second one is the "situated cognition" theory which postulates that all the action of subject proceeds according to social and physical context in which it appears. Although these two approaches appear a priori conflicting, several authors get to connect certain characteristics of these two theories. These authors propose the intervention of two forms of context in cognition. The purpose of this paper is to present this new approach and illustrate it with experimental studies.