Cognitive science
Rendering of human brain
Cognitive science may be concisely defined
as the study of the nature of intelligence. It
draws on multiple empirical disciplines, in-
cluding psychology,
philosophy,
neuros-
cience, linguistics, anthropology, computer
science, sociology and biology. The term cog-
nitive science was coined by Christopher
Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on
the Lighthill report, which concerned the
then-current state of Artificial Intelligence re-
search.[1] In the same decade, the journal
Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science
Society were founded.[2] Cognitive science
differs from cognitive psychology in that al-
gorithms that are intended to simulate hu-
man behavior are implemented or implement-
able on a computer.[3][4]
History
In Ancient Greece, philosophers Plato and
Aristotle sought to understand the nature of
human knowledge. In the 17th century, Des-
cartes popularized the notion that the body
and the mind were two separate entities,
known as Res Extensa and Res Cogitans. Oth-
er contributors to the study of the mind in
the 17th and 18th centuries included George
Berkeley, Robert Burton, Thomas Hobbes,
David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John
Locke. In the 1870s, Wilhelm Wundt moved
the study of human knowledge into the realm
of experimental psychology. In the early 20th
century, the popular notion of mind was
altered by John B. Watson’s behaviorist view-
point that consciousness was not an appro-
priate question for scientific inquiry and that
only observable behavior should be studied.
In the 1950s this prevailing viewpoint began
to change again as scientists started concep-
tualizing theories of mind based on complex
representations and computational proced-
ures. George A. Miller pioneered the concept
of mental representations, chunks of informa-
tion that are encoded and decoded within the
mind. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen
Newell, and Herbert Simon founded the field
of artificial
intelligence around the same
time. Noam Chomsky further removed the
study of the