This paper addresses from a theoretical point of view a once much debated issue which is brought back to the fore in psychology as a result of a growing attention to the effects of technology and of technological change on the way we live, learn and work. This issue concerns the relationships between cognition and the artifactual nature of many of the objects on which it is brought to bear in everyday, work and school situations.If cognition evolves, as genetic epistemology has shown, through interaction with the environment, then it can be expected, in the course of its genesis, to have to accomodate to the particular specific functional and structural features which characterize artifacts. Does this have an effect on cognitive development, on knowledge construction and processing, on the nature itself of the knowledge generated? If so, through what macro and microgenetic processes can this effect be thought to be actuated?These questions are of particular relevance in the fields of technology and vocational education, but, in theory, they concern all situations in which activity is instrumented by some sort of technology -including technology not habituaIly considered as such: symbols, numbers, graphics, etc. They also constitute an important dimension in the study of situated cognition.Discussion focuses first on the way past and present models of human cognition have related to instrumented activity and, subsequently, a model and concepts are suggested. These points are then illustrated through observational data relating to situations in which children were confro nted with tasks involving designing artifacts and utilizing unfamiliar machines, i.e. a lathe and a robot. Finally areas for future research within this problematic are sketched out.
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