Cognitive science

Cognitive science, the interdisciplinary scientific investigation of the mind and intelligence. It encompasses the ideas and methods of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience (see neurology), and anthropology. The term cognition, as used by cognitive scientists, refers to many kinds of thinking, including those involved in perception, problem solving, learning, decision making, language use, and emotional experience.

Nature and significance

According to some early modern philosophical theories and commonsense views, minds are not amenable to scientific study because they are immaterial or supernatural, as are souls and spirits (see mind-body dualism). Cognitive science, in contrast, treats the mind as wholly material. It aims to collect empirical evidence bearing on mental processes and phenomena and to develop theories that explain that evidence, which can come from many disciplines. Psychologists, for example, collect behavioral evidence in studies of language comprehension, inference making, social interaction, and emotional experience. Linguists systematically gather evidence about how people produce and understand sentences that are well-structured and meaningful. Neuroscientists use brain scans and other techniques to investigate the neural activity that accompanies different kinds of thought. And anthropologists study the nature of cognition as it occurs in many different cultural contexts.

The contributions of philosophy and computer science to the investigation of cognition are primarily theoretical. Philosophy asks very general questions about the nature of knowledge (epistemology), reality (metaphysics), and morality (ethics), among other topics. Many of these questions are directly relevant to how the mind works or to how it might work better. For example, a central epistemological question is how minds gain knowledge of the external world, and a central metaphysical question is whether mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of things.

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Computer science has been very important in cognitive science for two reasons. First, the notion of computation has been invaluable for developing ideas about how thinking might be a natural process. Previously, scientific theories of the mind relied on clumsy and unproductive analogies with mechanical devices such as clocks and electronic switchboards. The advent of computer programs made it possible to see how a mechanical device could solve complex problems by manipulating symbols, or representations, according to algorithmic procedures (computations), generating productive analogies for how minds might work in similar ways. Standard programming languages, for example, allowed for sequences of “IF…THEN…” instructions, which suggest a model of how people make plans (see below Approaches). Second, computers themselves have been useful for testing scientific hypotheses about mental organization and functioning. A given hypothesis is modeled in a program by constructing algorithms that mimic the entities and processes the hypothesis proposes. The program is then run on a computer, and if the computer’s output is similar in appropriate ways to real human performance, the hypothesis is considered to be supported.

Empirical theories of the mind are invaluable for guiding practice in many applied domains, including education, or pedagogy (see also educational psychology); operations research and human resources management; and engineering, in particular the design of tools and other devices that can be used effectively without placing excessive demands on people’s mental capacities (see human-factors engineering). Legal and medical reasoning (the reasoning involved in diagnosing and treating illness) also have been investigated by means of both psychological experiments and computational models. Cognitive science is particularly central to medicine because of the importance of mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia, whose explanation and treatment require an understanding of the cognitive and neural processes that underlie the operations of healthy minds.

Antecedents and early development

Attempts to understand the mind can be traced to the ancient Greeks, most notably to Plato and Aristotle. Of the two, Aristotle was the more scientific, tying his theories about mental processes more closely to observation than to abstract speculation. With the rise of modern science in the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume attempted to develop accounts of mental operations that would be as objective as Newtonian physics, but their efforts were hampered by a lack of robust experimental methods and theoretical ideas.

Scientific psychology did not arise until the mid-19th century, when the German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt and others developed more rigorous methods for conducting psychological experiments. In the 1920s and ’30s, much research in psychology and linguistics, among other social sciences, was dominated by an ultraexperimental approach called behaviourism, which rejected theorizing about “invisible” mental processes and emphasized the formulation of general laws that govern observable human behaviour. By the late 1950s, however, it had become clear that behaviourists could not even explain how rats learn to run mazes much less how humans learn complex behaviours such as those involved in language use.

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The modern origins of cognitive science lie in the mid-1950s, when a brilliant group of interdisciplinary thinkers began to apply ideas from the theory of computation to the scientific explanation of human thought. The computer scientists and psychologists Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy pioneered the new field of artificial intelligence, which was founded at an academic conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 with the ultimate aim of building computers and robots that could perform tasks commonly associated with human intelligence. The psychologist George Miller and the theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky also developed computational alternatives to behaviourist theories in their fields. These six figures have since been recognized as the founders of cognitive science.

The term itself, however, was not coined until the 1970s, when the interdisciplinary field became more formally organized. During this period the Cognitive Science Society and the journal Cognitive Science were founded, and programs and departments of cognitive science were established at many universities. By the late 20th century, cognitive science had become a flourishing academic enterprise with hundreds of departments throughout the world and numerous international societies, journals, and conferences.