 Artifacts are not only objects of knowledge; they are also involved in cognition itself. No one disputes that humans use artifacts in their cognitive practices—we do our sums on paper or with electronic devices; and memory aids from individual grocery lists to monuments enshrining cultural memory are ubiquitous. But in recent years a loosely interconnected collection of approaches has characterized artifacts as much more intimately involved in these processes than mere use might suggest. Rather than trying to sort out the complex family resemblances among embodied, enactive, situated, distributed and extended approaches to cognition (Sutton 2006; Wilson &amp; Clark 2009), we can more profitably focus on some representative studies of the way artifacts contribute to cognition in this family of views.