# Cognitive Scaffolding **Domain:** Cognition / Learning / Knowledge Architecture **Doc Type:** Canonical concept node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition Cognitive scaffolding is the support that prior knowledge, external structure, language, tools, and accumulated experience provide for learning or performing something new. ## Mechanism and Significance New information is easier to organize when it can attach to existing schemas and associations. Diverse experiences can therefore become a connected substrate for later competence even when they first appear scattered. ## Evidence Boundary Scaffolding supports learning without guaranteeing transfer. Connections must still be accurate, practiced, and relevant to the new task. ## Relationships [[wiki/Schema|Schema]] · [[wiki/Extended Mind Thesis|Extended Mind Thesis]] · [[wiki/Abstraction|Abstraction]] · [[wiki/Memory Architecture|Memory Architecture]] ## Related Articles and Collections - [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - [[articles/Analog Cognition and the Architecture of Continuity|Analog Cognition and the Architecture of Continuity]] - [[articles/Thank You for Your Attention to This Matter!|Thank You for Your Attention to This Matter!]] ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “Experience that looks scattered from the outside often becomes a scaffolding on the inside. Each skill, subject, or adventure adds a node to the mind’s web of associations, and new information that fits an existing schema is learned faster and remembered longer, the way a physician’s Latin vocabulary can make French or Spanish suddenly partly legible. The person accused of being all over the place may be building the connective structure from which unusual competence later emerges.” > **— Bryant McGill**, *Acting With Purpose Before Certainty Arrives - Livestream (Feb 2017)* [[reminders/Cognitive Agency/Scattered Experience Can Become Cognitive Scaffolding by Bryant McGill|Scattered Experience Can Become Cognitive Scaffolding by Bryant McGill]]