Cognitive science
Interdisciplinary scientific study of cognitive processesCognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion. To understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, economics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
- 1930s-1940sWarren McCulloch and Walter Pitts worked as early cyberneticists, seeking to understand the organizing principles of the mind.
- 1940s-1950sTheory of computation and digital computer were developed.
- 1950sCognitive sciences began as an intellectual movement known as the cognitive revolution.