Cognitive Science : Definition and Principles

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary scientific study of how information concerning facilities such as perception, language, reasoning and emotion is represented and transformed in a (human or other animal nervous system) or machine(e.g. computer)
It consists of multiple research disciplines such as psychology, artificial intelligence, philosohpy, neuroscience, learning sciences, lingusitics, anthropology, sociology and education.

Cognitive pscyhology has its roots in ancient greek philosophy.

Principles of Cognitive Science:

The central tenet of cognitive science is that a complete understanding of mind/brain cannot be attained by studying a single level .
So, there are three levels of analysis:

1. The computational theory, specifying the goals of computation
2. representation and algorithm, giving a representation of the input and output and the algorithm which transforms one into another
3. the hardware implementation, how algorithms may be physically realized.

Interdisciplinary Nature

The interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science comes from the fact that we share the philosophical roots with 3 complimentary scientific approached:

1st approach: Emphirical study of intelligent behavior in humans and other animals
These include learning, remembering and forgetting, visual perceptions and recognition and making decisions.

Cognitive neuroscientist study how blood flows , cognitive activities and other measures of brain physiology change as humans and other animals listed to language, trying to recall words.

Throgh computational modeling, we can try out the different processes that might combine to yield complex intelligent behavior.

Cognitive Science bridges the gap between questions about mind and emphirical research.

Cognitive Science can bring various fields together.