  There are ongoing divisions in the learning sciences between perspectives
that treat cognition as occurring within individual minds and those that treat
it as irreducibly distributed or situated in material and social contexts. We
contend that accounts of individual minds as complex systems are theoretically
continuous with distributed and situated cognition. On this view, the
difference is a matter of the scale of the dynamics of interest, and the choice
of scale can be informed by data. In this paper, we propose heuristics for
empirically determining the scale of the relevant cognitive dynamics. We
illustrate these heuristics in two contrasting cases, one in which the evidence
supports attributing cognition to a group of students and one in which the
evidence supports attributing cognition to an individual.
