Cognitive science

Cognitive Science is the scientific study of the mind and brain and how they give rise to behavior. The field is highly interdisciplinary and is closely related to several other areas, including psychology (especially cognitive psychology), artificial intelligence, linguistics and psycholinguistics, philosophy (especially philosophy of mind), neuroscience, logic, robotics, anthropology and biology (including biomechanics).

Principles of Cognitive Science

Levels of analysis

One of the central principles in cognitive science is that (1) there are different levels of analysis (LOA) from which the brain and behavior can be studied, and (2) mental phenomena are best studied from multiple levels of analysis. These levels are usually broken into three groups, based on Marr's description of them:

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• Behavioral level: describes the directly observable output (or behavior) of a system.
• Functional level: describes how information is processed to produce the behavioral output.
• Physical level: describes the physical substrate that the system consists of (e.g. the brain; neurons).

An analogy often used to describe LOA is to compare the brain to a computer. The physical level would consist of the computer's hardware, the behavioral level represents the computer's software, and the functional level would be the computer's operating system, which allows the software and hardware components to comunicate.

Related Topics:
Computer - Hardware - Software - Operating system

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The central tenet of cognitive science is that a complete understanding of the mind/brain cannot be attained by studying only a single level. For example, consider the problem of remembering a phone number and recalling it later. How does this process occur? One approach would be to study behavior through direct observation. You could present a person with a phone number, ask them to recall it after some delay, and measure their accuracy. Another approach would be to study the firings of individual neurons while a person is trying to remember the phone number. Neither of these experiments on their own would fully explain how the process of remembering a phone number works. Even if we had the technology available to map out every neuron in the brain in real-time, and we knew when each neuron was firing, we still would not know how a particular firing of neurons translates into the observed behavior. Thus, we need an understanding of how these to levels relate to each other. This can be provided by a functional level account of the process. By studying a particular phenomenon from multiple levels, we are better able to understand the processes that occur in the brain to give rise to a particular behavior.

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LOA gives rise to the idea that, whatever "mind" and "intelligence" are, they are rooted strictly in the brain, and do not make use of, depend on, or interact with anything non-physical. Nonetheless, there is reasonable consensus that there is sense in talking about the organization of the mind without talking about the organization of the brain, and that cognitive scientists are not simply neuroscientists. A cognitive scientist is likely to assert that what he says about reasoning is true at the functional level of abstraction, while what the neuroscientist says is true at the physical level implementing the functional level (much like a computer as a physical object implements a virtual machine on which programs run). An exploration of this is found in the Chinese Room argument, which proposes a gedanken experiment to elucidate potential loci for "cognition".

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Interdisciplinary nature

Closely related to LOA, cognitive science is a very interdisciplinary field and tends to view the world outside the mind much as other sciences do. Thus it has an objective, observer-independent existence. The field is usually seen as compatible with and interdependent with the physical sciences, and uses of the scientific method, as well as simulation or modeling, often comparing the output of models with aspects of human behavior. Still, there is much disagreement about the exact relationship between cognitive science and other fields, and the inter-disciplinary nature of cognitive science is largely both unrealized and circumscribed.

Related Topics:
Scientific method - Simulation - Modeling

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Many but not all who consider themselves cognitive scientists have a functionalist view of mind/intelligence, which means that, at least in theory, they study mind and intelligence from the perspective that these attributes could perhaps (at least someday) be properly attributed not only to human beings but also to, say, other animal species, alien life forms or particularly advanced computer sytems. This perspective is one of the reasons the term "cognitive science" is not exactly coextensive with neuroscience, psychology, or some combination of the two.

Related Topics:
Functionalist - Neuroscience - Psychology

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Cognitive science?

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 how "cognitive" is used in some traditions of analytic philosophy, where "cognitive" has to do only with formal rules and truth conditional semantics. (Nonetheless, that interpretation would bring one close to the historically dominant school of thought within cognitive science on the nature of cognition - that it is essentially symbolic, propositional, and logical.)

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The earliest entries for the word "cognitive" in the OED take it to mean roughly pertaining to "to the action or process of knowing". The first entry, from 1586, shows the word was at one time used in the context of 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.

Related Topics:
OED - Platonic - Knowledge

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