Artifacts as Memory Beyond the Agent Boundary

August 14, 2026 This talk centers on a particular phenomenon of situated cognition, one which highlights how environmental resources support competent action, alongside internal memory. I'll present a minimal framing of how the environment can function as an agent's memory. Central to this formalism is the concept of artifacts, which are observations that carry information about the past. This theory is corroborated by empirical results showing that when agents observe spatial paths, the amount of memory required to learn a performant policy is reduced. Interestingly, this effect arises uninte