What is Cognitive Science?

What is Cognitive Science?

Cognitive science is the science of mind and behavior

"Cognitive"

- Of or pertaining to cognition, or to the action or processes of knowing
- Understand knowledge acquisition and use is the key to understand the mind

Cognitive Science is the study of mind with special emphasis on use and acquisition of knowledge and information.

Implications:-

- An inter-disciplinary approach  - Many scientific disciplines contribute to Cognitive Science
- A Computational Approach - Explain information processing in terms of neural computations.

Information Processing Everywhere...

Perception
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- Acquiring real time information about the surrounding environment

Language Use
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Makng use of information about systems, semantics and phonology

Reasoning
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Combining different sources of information, deriving new information, testing consistency of information, etc.

Action
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Making use of information in action planning and guidance

Memory
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Storing and retrieving information

Important point:

Cognitive Science is about how the mind processes information.

What is special about Cognitive Science?
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- Focuses on knowledge and information as the key to understanding the mind

- Interdisciplinary
- Computation Approach
- Individualism
- Multi-level explanation

What is Computation?

Rule-based manipulation of symbols