In his 12 years of service as Founding and Executive Editor of Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS), Wayne Gray had only once hosted a topic of his own, even though he must have been incubating an ever-growing number of ideas, either for themes he was excited about or which he sensed were missing from the collection of topics published by the journal in its first decade. Eventually, as he was stepping down, he began to translate his ideas into action. For the first of these, he teamed up with two scholars, who share his interests in the relationship between tools, tasks, and techniques: cognitive neuroscientist François Osiurak from the Institut Universitaire de France and philosopher Richard Heersmink from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. As an ordinary team of scholars, the three submitted their proposal to the new editorial board. Less ordinary was the speed with which they shepherded their contributors through the protracted process of submitting, revising, occasionally re-revising, and finalizing their manuscripts, which is why I now have both the pleasure and the honor of introducing this topic already in my first year as Executive Editor.

“Tasks, Tools, and Techniques” is a topic at the heart of cognitive science, both classic and modern, with roots in ecological approaches (e.g., Gibson, 1979; Hutchins, 1995; Norman, 1993; for a review, see Hutchins, 2010), ramifications to theories of grounded cognition (Barsalou, 2010; Clark, 2008; Shapiro, 2019), and implications for the reconstruction of cognitive evolution (e.g., Stout & Chaminade, 2012). This collection is broad and comprehensive in other ways as well: It spans the evolutionary history of our species and its dispersal across the globe; it addresses the role of tools from a set of theoretical perspectives, which range from embodiment to expertise, and investigates tool use across levels of cognition from perception to behavior and back to neural rewiring. If this list does not yet entice you, I can add that the topic also covers a potpourri of cultural domains, such as means of subsistence, co-speech gesture, computer games, and driver assistance systems in automobiles.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this variety of approaches, the editors in their introduction weave a complex tapestry that connects tasks to tools to techniques. Part of what renders this collection so intriguing is that it not only asks “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” but it asks an even more puzzling question, namely, “which is the chicken, and which is the egg?”

在担任认知科学主题 (topiCS)创始和执行编辑的 12 年里，韦恩·格雷只主持过一次自己的主题，尽管他一定一直在酝酿越来越多的想法，无论是主题还是主题。他对此感到兴奋，或者他感觉到该杂志在第一个十年出版的主题集中缺少哪些内容。最终，当他卸任时，他开始将自己的想法转化为行动。对于第一个项目，他与两位学者合作，他们对工具、任务和技术之间的关系有着共同的兴趣：法国大学研究所的认知神经科学家弗朗索瓦·奥西拉克和澳大利亚墨尔本莫纳什大学的哲学家理查德·赫尔斯明克。作为一个普通的学者团队，三人向新一届编委会提交了自己的提案。不寻常的是，他们引导贡献者完成提交、修改、偶尔重新修改和定稿的漫长过程的速度，这就是为什么我现在既高兴又荣幸地在我的第一篇文章中介绍这个主题。年担任执行主编。

“任务、工具和技术”是经典和现代认知科学的核心主题，其根源在于生态方法（例如，Gibson，1979；Hutchins，1995；Norman，1993；有关评论，请参阅Hutchins，2010），对扎根认知理论的影响（Barsalou，2010；Clark，2008；Shapiro，2019），以及对认知进化重建的影响（例如，Stout & Chaminade，2012）。这个收藏在其他方面也广泛而全面：它涵盖了我们物种的进化历史及其在全球的传播；它从一系列理论角度（从具体化到专业知识）探讨了工具的作用，并研究了从感知到行为再到神经重新布线的跨认知层面的工具使用。如果这个列表还没有吸引你，我可以补充一下，这个主题还涵盖了文化领域的大杂烩，例如生存手段、共同语言手势、电脑游戏和汽车驾驶辅助系统。

尽管有这种多种多样的方法，或者可能正因为如此，编辑们在介绍中编织了一幅复杂的挂毯，将任务、工具和技术联系起来。这个系列之所以如此有趣，部分原因在于它不仅问“先有鸡还是先有蛋？” 但它提出了一个更令人费解的问题，即“哪个是鸡，哪个是蛋？”