Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion. To understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.Thagard, Paul, Cognitive Science , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
History The cognitive sciences began as an intellectual movement in the 1950s, called the cognitive revolution. Cognitive science has a prehistory traceable back to ancient Greek philosophical texts (see Plato's Meno and Aristotle's ).
The modern culture of cognitive science can be traced back to the early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who sought to understand the organizing principles of the mind. McCulloch and Pitts developed the first variants of what are now known as artificial neural networks, models of computation inspired by the structure of biological neural networks.
Another precursor was the early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s. Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann were instrumental in these developments. The modern computer, or Von Neumann machine, would play a central role in cognitive science, both as a metaphor for the mind and as a tool for investigation.
The first instance of cognitive science experiments being conducted at an academic institution occurred at MIT Sloan School of Management, where J.C.R. Licklider worked in the psychology department and conducted experiments using computer memory as a model of human cognition.Kita, C.I. (2003). "JCR Licklider's vision for the IPTO". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 25(3), 62-77. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1226656"J.C.R. Licklider". Internet Pioneers. Retrieved from https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/licklider.html#:~:text=%22Throughout%20the%20period%20I%20examined,for%20a%20decision%20or%20an In 1959, Noam Chomsky published a scathing review of B. F. Skinner's book Verbal Behavior. At the time, Skinner's behaviorist paradigm dominated the field of psychology within the United States. Most psychologists focused on functional relations between stimulus and response, without positing internal representations. Chomsky argued that to explain language, we needed a theory like generative grammar, which not only posited internal representations but also characterized their underlying order.Marino, C.; Gervain, J. (2019). "The impact of generative linguistics on psychology: Language acquisition, a paradigm example". Acta Linguistica Academica, 66(3), 371-396. https://doi.org/10.1556/2062.2019.66.3.4
The term cognitive science was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of artificial intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society were founded.Cognitive Science Society The founding meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held at the University of California, San Diego in 1979, which resulted in cognitive science becoming an internationally visible enterprise. In 1972, Hampshire College started the first undergraduate education program in Cognitive Science, led by Neil Stillings. In 1982, with assistance from Professor Stillings, Vassar College became the first institution in the world to grant an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science. In 1986, the first Cognitive Science Department in the world was founded at the University of California, San Diego.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, as access to computers increased, artificial intelligence research expanded. Researchers such as Marvin Minsky would write computer programs in languages such as LISP to attempt to formally characterize the steps that human beings went through, for instance, in making decisions and solving problems, in the hope of better understanding human thought, and also in the hope of creating artificial minds. This approach is known as "symbolic AI".
Eventually, the limits of the symbolic AI research program became apparent. For instance, it seemed to be unrealistic to comprehensively list human knowledge in a form usable by a symbolic computer program. The late 80s and 90s saw the rise of neural networks and connectionism as a research paradigm. From this point of view, often attributed to James McClelland and David Rumelhart, the mind can be characterized as a set of complex associations represented as a layered network. Critics argue that symbolic models better capture some phenomena, and that connectionist models are often so complex as to have little explanatory power. Recently, symbolic and connectionist models have been combined, enabling the use of both forms of explanation. While both connectionism and symbolic approaches have proven useful for testing various hypotheses and exploring approaches to understanding aspects of cognition and lower level brain functions, neither are biologically realistic and therefore, both suffer from a lack of neuroscientific plausibility. Connectionism has proven useful for exploring computationally how cognition emerges in development and occurs in the human brain, and has provided alternatives to strictly domain-specific / domain general approaches. For example, scientists such as Jeff Elman, Liz Bates, and Annette Karmiloff-Smith have posited that brain networks emerge from the dynamic interaction between them and environmental input.
Recent developments in quantum computation, including the ability to run quantum circuits on quantum computers such as the IBM Quantum Platform, have accelerated research into cognitive models that incorporate elements of quantum mechanics.Pothos, E. M., & Busemeyer, J. R. (2022). Quantum Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 73, 749–778.Widdows, D., Rani, J., & Pothos, E. M. (2023). Quantum Circuit Components for Cognitive Decision-Making. Entropy, 25(4), 548.
Principles Levels of analysis
A central tenet of cognitive science is that a complete understanding of the mind/brain cannot be attained by studying only a single level. An example would be the problem of remembering a phone number and recalling it later. One approach to understanding this process would be to study behavior through direct observation, or naturalistic observation. A person could be presented with a phone number and asked to recall it after a delay; the accuracy of the response could then be measured. Another approach to measuring cognitive ability would be to study the firing of individual neurons while a person is trying to remember a phone number. Neither of these experiments on its own would fully explain how the process of remembering a phone number works.
Even if the technology to map every neuron in the brain in real time were available, and it were known when each neuron fired, it would still be impossible to know how a particular firing of neurons translates into subjective experience including observed behavior. Thus, an understanding of how these two levels relate is imperative. Francisco Varela, in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, argues that "the new sciences of the mind need to enlarge their horizon to encompass both lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience".Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. On the classic cognitivist view, this can be provided by a functional level account of the process. Studying a phenomenon at multiple levels provides a better understanding of the brain processes that give rise to a particular behavior. MarrMarr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. W. H. Freeman. gave a famous description of three levels of analysis:
The computational theory, specifying the goals of the computation; Representation and algorithms, giving a representation of the inputs and outputs and the algorithms which transform one into the other; and The hardware implementation, or how algorithm and representation may be physically realized.
Interdisciplinary nature Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field with contributors from various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, and biology. Cognitive scientists work collectively in the hope of understanding the mind and its interactions with the surrounding world, much like scientists in other fields. The field regards itself as compatible with the physical sciences. It uses the scientific method as well as simulation or modeling, often comparing model outputs with aspects of human cognition. Similar to the field of psychology, there is some doubt whether there is a unified cognitive science, which has led some researchers to prefer 'cognitive sciences' in plural.
Many, but not all, who consider themselves cognitive scientists hold a functionalist view of the mind—the view that mental states and processes should be explained by their function – what they do. According to the multiple realizability account of functionalism, even non-human systems such as robots and computers can be ascribed as having cognitive states.Putnam, H. (1980). "The nature of mental states". In The language and thought series (pp. 223-231). Harvard University Press. Retrieved from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.9780674594623.c26/html
Cognitive science, the term The term "cognitive" in "cognitive science" is used for "any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This conceptualization is very broad and should not be confused with the use of "cognitive" in some traditions of analytic philosophy, where "cognitive" concerns only formal rules and truth-conditional semantics.
The earliest entries for the word "cognitive" in the OED take it to mean roughly "pertaining to the action or process of knowing". The first entry, from 1586, shows that the word was once used in discussions of Platonic theories of knowledge. Most in cognitive science, however, presumably do not believe their field is the study of anything as certain as the knowledge sought by Plato.
Scope