This synthesis note, aimed at obtaining the authorization to supervise research in education and training sciences, proposes a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the links between sociocultural data and cognitive processes involved in learning situations. The paradigm of distributed cognition is used to define, as the unit of analysis, the structural coupling between subjects and artifacts. The first part of this note synthesizes the results of my work on educational technologies, using the paradigmatic prism that constitutes the core of this work: articulating cognitive and social process dynamics, and uncovering the links between subjects' social trajectories and the use of digital artifacts. In other words, the goal is to understand the dynamics that connect the general (the social position of the subjects) to the particular (situations, artifacts). The articulation of factors at different levels (with an initial ternary and trilogical micro-meso-macro articulation) (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), in order to analyze instrumented educational and formative phenomena, involves a hierarchical multi-scale analysis mobilizing concepts from various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. The second part continues this reflection by exploring different theoretical frameworks and horizons that contribute to our understanding of the phenomena we are attempting to elucidate: how does this tension between the general and the particular occur, and how can it be explained, particularly from a temporal perspective. I analytically present the foundations of situated approaches in the humanities and social sciences, linking distributed cognition to its anchorage in the cultural and sociomaterial conditions of its emergence, as well as with sociological approaches that can be mobilized to understand the social and cognitive dynamics of situated individuals (Lave and Wenger, 1991), or what I call “sociocultural moments”, as moments of distributed human activity over time. Here, I outline theoretical orientations, from the field of so-called “dispositionalist” sociology (Lahire, 2006), embodied and grounded approaches to cognition (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1993; Wilson, 2002; Barsalou, 2008), cognitive psychology (Tricot and Sweller, 2016), philosophy of knowledge (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Spinoza), and more specifically cognitive anthropology (Hutchins, 1995), based on distributed cognition, which I deepen in its temporal and sociological dimensions, guiding the relationship between the constitution of our models of the world (Friston, 2013), our perception readiness (Bruner, 1957), and “what happens” in a situation, as a socially and culturally constituted frame (Goffman, 1971). I conclude with the philosophical debate between the Cartesian (dualistic) and Spinozist (monist) approach to the articulation between mind and matter, showing how the Spinozist rupture is an essential step in the development of distributed cognition approaches, particularly by mobilizing the concepts of conatus and immanence, where we highlight theoretical links with Varela’s autopoiesis. Through its self-preserving property, the conatus encompasses an autopoietic dimension. Through auto-causation, autopoiesis would thus refer to a self-referential immanent conatus, drawing from its ontology the power towards perseverance and realization of being. The third part is the culmination of this outline. It introduces two novel concepts: the first concept is the phenomenon of “congruence” (or “congruence principle”) as being understood within this cognitive temporal structure, which allows the subject to actualize the constitutive dispositions of their “internal frame of reference”, which is the second concept. Congruency occurs between one’s “internal frame of reference” and local availabilities (i.e. “external frames of reference”) (Lave, 1988; Suchman, 1987; Norman, 1993; Hutchins, 1995; Quéré, 1997). Why a frame of reference? • The assumption of a frame of reference is consistent with the distributed and embodied approach to cognition: there is no physical location where knowledge, symbols, representations, habits, etc., are stored. Cognitive processes and available information are distributed across brain networks, the body, and the environment. This assumption is consistent with a semiotic and enactive approach to cognition: through sense-making, the subject refers to internalized objects or objects present in the environment. Through prior internalizations of categories, the subject is ready to recognize the framework of a social action. • The frame of reference is individual and shared, as it arises from internalizations of external processes: it is thus inseparable from the dialectic of interiority/exteriority, ascending/descending processes. • The frame of reference acts with the subject in action, with the subject being its own reference, which is consistent with the principle of autopoiesis and embodied cognition. • The frame of reference is modal: it refers to sensorimotor schemes, which emerge according to the level of congruence related to the coupling of the subject with the environment. This makes various hypotheses of preparation for perception acceptable, in the sense that the frame of reference acts as a perceptual filter. • The frame of reference integrates a dispositionalist sociological approach, with dispositions being incorporated traits, but whose genesis results from social experiences and only act when actualized in a situation. Methodologically using the concept of a frame of reference makes it possible to explain different behaviors of individuals in similar social situations, and conversely, those of the “plural individual” (Lahire, 1998, 2023), mobilizing different dispositions depending on the situation (or social context). Congruence aims to understand the processes of subject-situation equilibration. I analyze the effects of an observed gap between the characteristics of a subject (their “internal frame of reference”) and those of a situation and local availabilities (the “external frame of reference”): heterogeneous dispositions within different social situations (Lahire, 2014) and the cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1959) are mobilized to show that there is an organismic drive towards a return to a state of internal consistency, as well as the theory of the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), which describes how the individual attempts to bridge the gap between the state of their knowledge and those that remain to be reached through sociocultural interactions between internal and external states. I show that a degree of – reasonable – congruence can constitute for the subject a space-time conducive to their development, since it generates situated cultural practices, as residues of partial solutions to encountered problems (Hutchins, 1995). Through their qualified intentionality (Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2022), subjects then enactively engage with this created space of possibilities (the “congruence delta”), through active inference (Pezzulo, Rigoli and Friston, 2015; Clark, 2015), by processing epistemic and pragmatic affordances during action (Friston, 2022). This inference, by producing meaning, is a situated practice “for-action” before being a product of this action. Finally, the fourth part operationalizes my theoretical propositions from a methodological perspective, putting them to the test of projects and research programs focusing on educational technologies. Our epistemological and methodological positioning has led us to propose that situated action and learning (Suchman, 1987; Lave and Wenger, 1991) mobilize an “internal frame of reference” (dispositions, Lahire, 2001; modal schemes, Versace et al., 2017; routines and embodied plans, Suchman, 1987; perception-readiness, Bruner, 1957), interacting with an “external frame of reference” as an aid to action (local affordances: Lave, 1988; Norman, 1993; Hutchins, 1995; Quéré, 1997, which can also be distal), according to the characteristics and cognitive and cultural demands of the situation. These “frames of reference”, aiming to consider the system as the unit of analysis, are at least methodological (Stahl, 2005): the researcher can thus understand the internalized processes as well as the components of the environment that will determine some of the perceptions and behaviors of the subjects in a learning setting. I propose to study cognition in the wild by analyzing embodied and situated human behaviors, mobilizing – in part – rigorous methods proven by well-established laboratory techniques, but also by immersion in the sociocultural environment, by collecting data on the culture, work organization, artifacts made available, the specificity of operators organizing the activity realization (Hutchins, 1995; Simonian, 2022). The “Distributed Hierarchical Method” (DHM) analyzes the “congruence delta” within the “frames of references square” (internal-external and local-general), using their “Operational Constituents” (OC). The goal is to identify and study the structural coupling between the OCs of each frame of reference (internal-external and local-general), and thus identify the nature of this relationship. The general idea of the DHM is to analyze, within the subject-situation coupling, whether discrepancies, tensions, have been observed within the different levels of coupling in the “frames of references square”, and to verify if this delta has induced an enactive behavior from the subjects and active inferences, with a developmental aim, in other words, an embodied and situated learning “for-action”. This “frames of references square” induces congruence through the actions of the subjects, contributing to their development. The objective is to collect behavioral, psychological, physiological, and emotional data (depending on the research subject and methodological possibilities) in order to characterize the relational dynamics (the congruence delta) between subjects (micro level) and local affordances (meso level), taking into account the general context (macro level). From a praxeological perspective, we perceive several utilities in testing the congruence phenomenon for scientific purposes, especially for research in education and training sciences, and more restrictively, for educational technologies and computer-assisted learning environments: • The phenomenon of congruence can be tested in macrological crisis contexts to understand the reconfiguration of practices among actors in the educational system, how they react by creating or innovating (for example, the COVID health crisis provided a conducive environment for observing organizational and human activity reconfigurations: emergency hybridization and digitization of teaching, deployment of socio-digital systems, rise of teleworking, etc.). • Congruence can help understand, from the perspective of situated theories of cognition, what happens in the “empty space between the social level and the neuronal level”, and what happens between a passive approach to learning (in reaction to a context, via percepts), and an active approach by directly acting on the environment (Dillenbourg, 1996). • Congruence, understood within a situated and distributed approach to cognition, can offer a possible response to considering micro-meso-macro factors, in order to better understand the issues of replicability in psychology in general, and those concerning cognitive load theory in particular (Sweller, 2023), taking into account the coupling between individual factors and the characteristics of the socio-material and technopedagogical framework. • Congruence can be mobilized to understand the functioning of cognitive systems, by considering the political context and power dynamics among individuals. So far, these dynamics have been outside the scope of research on cognition. For example, political programs can explain how status disparities influence social interactions (for example, Linde, 1988), or how subjects behave in the context of a broader political arena (Moore and Rocklin, 1998), as distal effects on the local cognitive system (Halverson and Clifford, 2006). Finally, congruence is considered immanent, as a way to grasp reality and the meaning of that reality. It could thus constitute the link between empiricism and the axiological neutrality constitutive of the phenomenological approach. To bridge the gap between individual experience, conscious and unconscious internalizations, and the properties of an on-line situation, the brain would act as a “correlator” (Vandaele, 2007) between the properties of signals and scenes to give rise to consciousness (Edelman, 1992). From an evolutionary perspective, the brain's structure would be incrementally influenced by these social and cultural situations, these successive social moments, and this structure would preside over the emergence of cognition in a situation (Tomasello, 2001). These bottom-up and top-down feedback loops seem to provide a better understanding of the semio-constructivist principle specific to enaction, without succumbing to the all-encompassing cultural constructionism in the sense of Pharo (2011). Cognition would thus be “sociomaterial”, in that it proceeds from the conditions of its emergence. Our consciousness would thus be governed by these correlations, these phenomenological and immanent congruences. Driven by our persistence in our being, we would go so far as to say that consciousness emerges because, in feedback loops, our embodied mind connects our past experiences, what constitutes us, and the everyday sociocultural frameworks, in an enactive dynamic in recognition of reality: this is how our conatus projects itself into the world. Our behaviors, our affects, and our choices are a distant resonance of the lived sociocultural moments, and situations contribute to defining us.