Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.

Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive science held are within the individual brain, are actually distributed in sociocultural systems that constitute the tools to think and perceive the world. Thus, an individual can perceive the specific environment and organize his perceptions following typical mental representations of his sociocultural system. According to Hutchins, cognition involves not only the brain but also external artifacts, work teams made up of several people, and cultural systems for interpreting reality (mythical, scientific, or otherwise). Hutchins' distributed cognition theory explains mental processes by taking as the fundamental unit of analysis "a collection of individuals and artifacts and their relations to each other in a particular work practice". Distributed cognition theory is part of the interdisciplinary field of embodied cognitive science, also called embodied cognition.

Hutchins' distributed cognition theory influenced philosopher Andy Clark, who shortly after proposed his own version of the theory, calling it "extended cognition" (see, for example, the paper The Extended Mind).

"DCog" is a specific approach to distributed cognition (distinct from other meanings) which takes a computational perspective towards goal-based activity systems.

The distributed cognition approach uses insights from cultural anthropology, sociology, embodied cognitive science, and the psychology of Lev Vygotsky (cf. cultural-historical psychology). It emphasizes the ways that cognition is off-loaded into the environment through social and technological means. This framework involves the coordination between individuals, artifacts and the environment.

According to Zhang & Norman (1994), the distributed cognition approach has three key components:

DCog studies the "propagation of representational states across media". Mental content is considered to be non-reducible to individual cognition and is more properly understood as off-loaded and extended into the environment, where information is also made available to other agents (Heylighen, Heath, & Overwalle, 2003). It is often understood as an approach in specific opposition to earlier and still prevalent "brain in a vat" models which ignore "situatedness, embodiment and enaction" as key to any cognitive act (Ibid.).

These representation-based frameworks consider distributed cognition as "a cognitive system whose structures and processes are distributed between internal and external representations, across a group of individuals, and across space and time". In general terms, they consider a distributed cognition system to have two components: internal and external representations. In their description, internal representations are knowledge and structure in individuals' minds while external representations are knowledge and structure in the external environment (Zhang, 1997b; Zhang and Norman, 1994).