Barbara Rogoff reflects on the sources and pathway of her work on understanding culture and individual learning as aspects of a mutually constituting process. She describes her efforts across decades to convey the idea that learning is a process of transforming one’s participation in cultural communities, which simultaneously contributes to transforming and maintaining the communities’ cultural practices. As ways of getting traction on understanding and researching from the mutually constituting perspective, Rogoff offers the metaphors of lenses that bring aspects of the overall process into focus, and fractals that aid in seeing the similarity of cultural patterns across both small moments and generations. She connects these ideas with several concepts and lines of research that she and her colleagues have contributed: everyday cognition, guided participation, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) to family and community endeavors, interdependence with autonomy, collaborative initiative, simultaneous attention, fluid collaboration, and “Barbara’s do-do theory.”

Sense of control over one’s life declines in the later portion of the life span, which is not surprising in the face of increased losses and decreased gains associated with aging. Unfortunately, the maintenance of sense of control is a key indicator of successful aging while low control beliefs are a risk factor for poor aging-related outcomes, such as lower concurrent and subsequent cognitive functioning. The simultaneous focus on the person and the environment is an important characteristic of research on control beliefs. We synthesize the state of the field and discuss the current understanding of the complex interplay of control beliefs and cognition. In addition, we propose that awareness of aging, which is the subjective interpretation of aging, may be an important future direction to elucidate the control-cognition relationships.