cognitive science
In plain wordsThe scientific study of how minds work — how we reason, use language, remember and see — combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence.
The study of mind and intelligence pursued jointly by psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy and anthropology, the six fields of the hexagon that served as its traditional emblem. Its founding assumption was the computational theory of mindcomputational theory of mind, n.: The idea that thinking is a kind of computation: the mind processes information by following rules, much as a computer runs a program, and the brain is the machine doing it.: that perception, memory, language and reasoning can be understood as information processing over representations, so that computational models can serve as theories of cognition. Successive approaches include symbolic models, connectionismconnectionism, n.: The view that minds and intelligent machines are best built from huge networks of simple, neuron-like units whose connection strengths are learned, rather than from explicit rules and symbols., dynamical and embodiedembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand. approaches, Bayesian models and predictive processingpredictive processing, n.: The idea that the brain is a prediction machine: it constantly guesses what its senses will report next and learns mainly from its mistakes, so what we perceive is largely its best guess.; methods include behavioral experiments, computational modeling and neuroimaging, often organized by Marr's levels of analysisMarr's levels of analysis, n.: A way of explaining any information-processing system on three levels: what problem it solves and why, what step-by-step method it uses, and how that method is physically built.. The field has a two-way relationship with AI: cognitive models inspired neural networksneural network, n.: A kind of computer program that learns a task from examples by tuning thousands to billions of connections between simple number-crunching units, an arrangement loosely inspired by nerve cells in the brain. and reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time., and language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. are now used both as models of human cognition and as subjects of machine psychologymachine psychology, n.: Studying AI systems the way psychologists study people — with carefully designed experiments on their behavior — to discover what they can do, how they reason and where they go wrong..
Origin
The term is usually credited to Christopher Longuet-Higgins, who used it in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report on AI. Many date the field's birth to an MIT symposium on 11 September 1956 at which George Miller, Noam Chomsky, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon presented work; the journal Cognitive Science began in 1977 and the Cognitive Science Society in 1979.
Related
- computational theory of mindcomputational theory of mind, n.: The idea that thinking is a kind of computation: the mind processes information by following rules, much as a computer runs a program, and the brain is the machine doing it.
- connectionismconnectionism, n.: The view that minds and intelligent machines are best built from huge networks of simple, neuron-like units whose connection strengths are learned, rather than from explicit rules and symbols.
- embodied cognitionembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand.
- predictive processingpredictive processing, n.: The idea that the brain is a prediction machine: it constantly guesses what its senses will report next and learns mainly from its mistakes, so what we perceive is largely its best guess.
- Marr's levels of analysisMarr's levels of analysis, n.: A way of explaining any information-processing system on three levels: what problem it solves and why, what step-by-step method it uses, and how that method is physically built.
- machine psychologymachine psychology, n.: Studying AI systems the way psychologists study people — with carefully designed experiments on their behavior — to discover what they can do, how they reason and where they go wrong.
- cognitive architecturecognitive architecture, n.: A blueprint for a complete thinking system — how memory, attention, learning and decision-making fit together — used both to build general AI agents and to model how the human mind works.
Sources
- Miller, G. A. (2003). The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3), 141–144.
Mentioned in
attentionattention, n.: A way for an AI model to choose what to focus on. For each word it processes, the model scores how relevant every other word is and draws information mostly from the relevant ones., computational theory of mindcomputational theory of mind, n.: The idea that thinking is a kind of computation: the mind processes information by following rules, much as a computer runs a program, and the brain is the machine doing it., Douglas HofstadterDouglas Hofstadter, prop. n.: An American cognitive scientist whose prize-winning book 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' inspired a generation to study minds and AI, and who studies analogy as the heart of thinking., embodied cognitionembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand., functionalismfunctionalism, n.: The view that minds are defined by how they work, not what they are made of: pain, for example, is whatever inner state plays pain's part, linking injury, other thoughts and behavior., Herbert A. SimonHerbert A. Simon, prop. n.: An American scientist of decision-making who, with Allen Newell, wrote some of the first AI programs and argued that minds and computers both think by manipulating symbols., Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky, prop. n.: An American linguist whose theories of grammar reshaped linguistics and cognitive science, and who argues that chatbots like ChatGPT imitate language without understanding it., philosophy of artificial intelligencephilosophy of artificial intelligence, n.: The branch of philosophy that asks what AI is and could be: whether machines can think, understand or be conscious, what intelligence is, and what we owe to and should expect from intelligent machines., predictive processingpredictive processing, n.: The idea that the brain is a prediction machine: it constantly guesses what its senses will report next and learns mainly from its mistakes, so what we perceive is largely its best guess., System 1 and System 2System 1 and System 2, phr.: A popular way of describing two modes of thinking: fast, automatic and intuitive (System 1) versus slow, effortful and deliberate (System 2). AI researchers borrow it to contrast instant answers with step-by-step reasoning., behaviorismbehaviorism, n.: The view that the mind should be studied, or even defined, only through observable behavior rather than inner thoughts or feelings. It shapes debates about whether AI that acts intelligently really is intelligent., binding problembinding problem, n.: The puzzle of how a brain, or a neural network, keeps track of which features belong together — that the red goes with the apple and the green with the leaf — when they are processed separately., extended mindextended mind, n.: The idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would., folk psychologyfolk psychology, n.: The everyday way people explain and predict each other's actions in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, as in 'she took an umbrella because she thought it would rain'., machine psychologymachine psychology, n.: Studying AI systems the way psychologists study people — with carefully designed experiments on their behavior — to discover what they can do, how they reason and where they go wrong., Marr's levels of analysisMarr's levels of analysis, n.: A way of explaining any information-processing system on three levels: what problem it solves and why, what step-by-step method it uses, and how that method is physically built.