Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Models of cognition and learning structure and inform the thinking and action of educational practitioners and researchersalike. They serve as a communication device both within and between research and practice. There is a need for a holis-tic framework of cognition that appropriately reflects and synthesizes the current state of the field of the cognitive andlearning sciences with its rich diversity of research agendas. I propose such a model, which conceptualizes learning asunfolding from three interlinked basic domains: Conscious thought in the form of percepts and symbolic representationsin a symbolic-conceptual domain; foundational preconscious processing in a domain of cognitive metaphor; as well assituated, embodied interaction in a tangible enculturated agent-environment domain. The fundamental theoretical com-mitment of this Holistic Framework of Cognition and Learning is to dynamical systems theory. Emergence serves as thefunctional binder that ties the frameworks seemingly disparate elements together into a coherent whole.