cognitive science

cognitive science
the study of the precise nature of different mental tasks and the operations of the brain that enable them to be performed, engaging branches of psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.

* * *

Interdisciplinary study that attempts to explain the cognitive processes of humans and some higher animals in terms of the manipulation of symbols using computational rules.

The field draws particularly on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, psychology (see cognitive psychology), linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Some chief areas of research in cognitive science have been vision, thinking and reasoning, memory, attention, learning, and language processing. Early theories of cognitive function attempted to explain the evident compositionality of human thought (thoughts are built up of smaller units put together in a certain way), as well as its productivity (the process of putting together a thought from smaller units can be repeated indefinitely to produce an infinite number of new thoughts), by assuming the existence of discrete mental representations that can be put together or taken apart according to rules that are sensitive to the representations' syntactic, or structural, properties. This "language of thought" hypothesis was later challenged by an approach, variously referred to as connectionism, parallel-distributed processing, or neural-network modeling, according to which cognitive processes (such as pattern recognition) consist of adjustments in the activation strengths of neuronlike processing units arranged in a network.

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужна курсовая?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • cognitive science — n an interdisciplinary science that draws on many fields (as psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy) in developing theories about human perception, thinking, and learning cognitive scientist n …   Medical dictionary

  • cognitive science — n. the study of cognition, involving the disciplines of psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, etc …   English World dictionary

  • Cognitive science — Figure illustrating the fields that contributed to the birth of cognitive science, including linguistics, education, neuroscience, artificial Intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Adapted from Miller, George A (2003). The… …   Wikipedia

  • Cognitive Science — Die Kognitionswissenschaft (englisch Cognitive Science) ist ein relativ junger Wissenschaftszweig, dessen Ziel es ist, kognitive Fähigkeiten zu erforschen. Zu diesen Fähigkeiten werden etwa Wahrnehmung, Denken, Lernen, Motorik und Sprache gezählt …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Cognitive science of religion — is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including: cognitive psychology, evolutionary… …   Wikipedia

  • Cognitive Science and Neuropsychology Program of Szeged — University of Szeged Portal of Faculty of Arts …   Wikipedia

  • Cognitive Science Society — The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society… …   Wikipedia

  • Cognitive science of mathematics — The cognitive science of mathematics is the study of mathematical ideas (concepts) using the techniques of cognitive science. It proposes to ground the foundations of mathematics in the empirical study of human cognition and metaphor.This… …   Wikipedia

  • cognitive science — noun the field of science concerned with cognition; includes parts of cognitive psychology and linguistics and computer science and cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind • Hypernyms: ↑science, ↑scientific discipline • Part Meronyms:… …   Useful english dictionary

  • cognitive science — noun Date: 1975 an interdisciplinary science that draws on many fields (as psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy) in developing theories about human perception, thinking, and learning • cognitive scientist noun …   New Collegiate Dictionary

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”