Abstract

Throughout the last 25 years there has been much research generated in the area of team cognition and distributed cognition, often independent from each other. However more recently these two areas have congealed in a way that makes them interrelated in myriad ways. Our book in 2001 (McNeese, Salas, & Endsley, 2001) among many others focused more distinctively on team cognition and in many ways was predicated on the study of teams, teamwork, and team performance that educed from a long history within the tradition of industrial/organizational psychology. This chapter provides an introduction to the Handbook of Distributed Team Cognition and provides a broader array of worldviews, histories, methodologies, measures, and applications than what was possible in the time of the first book. As part of this milieu is the important role that information, computation, and technology has played in defining multiple perspectives that have melded together distributed and team cognition, often in unique and innovative ways. This chapter hence provides an initial foray into the intermingling of what distributed means in the context of real-world environments where technology is highly active and present. The use of the autobiographic method is applied in the second part of the chapter to show how interdisciplinary science came into play to shape the first editor’s worldview and research prowess within distributed team cognition.