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Cognitive Science |
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Cognitive Science is "the science of the mind". It is distinguished by an information processing approach, or an approach that emphasizes formal structures and processes, their representational significance and ultimately their physical implementations. There is not yet an unified view on cognitive science. It is a field that combines findings and research from area's such as Linguistics, neurology, psychology, computer science (Artificial Intelligence) and Philosophy.
This is a textbook I'd loved to have as a course material back in 1990 when I studied Cognitive Science. It is meant as a starting point for students in graduate student courses. In more than 500 pages it covers (among others) sensation of perception, attention, memory, learning, knowledge representation, Language, Problem Solving, Reasoning, Intelligence and Consciousness, .... The nice thing about it is that each chapter gives you the different point of views on the topic, complete with references so that you can find out more about a particular topic that catches your attention. If I say you'll find over 800 references in total, you might agree that this work is quite complete. From an NLP point of view this book gave me several idea's for extensions and corrections to the field.
In the A.I. company where I used to work, this textbook for undergraduate programs was seen as "the bible" to the field. The definition of cognitive science I give you at the top of this page is "rewritten" from the "Note to the teacher" in this book.
This book is published as a part of the series on "Cognitive Models of Cognition and Perception." It is a rich interdisciplinary study of the prospects for a unified cognitive neurobiology.
A lot of people in the field seem to cite this book as one of the books to read. It seems to be a very readable introduction to the linguistic part of the CS field, albeit heavily biased by Pinker's own point of view. When I bought this book, I violated my own rule that it is best to buy a book in its original language. As a matter of fact, I don't really like the translation, which explains why this book has been on my shelf since early 1997 without being fully read (I took it of the shelf to check out a few sections, though).
George A.Miller is someone who barely needs an introduction for anyone active in the fields related to cognitive sciences. In NLP he is known as the father of the TOTE-model. For the rest of the world he is known for his paper on the "Magical Number Seven". This book is the winner of the 1992 APA William James Book Award, I recommend it as alternative or complementary reading to Steven Pinker's book.
Another title for this book could have been "Cognitive Science, The first 40 years". Here you'll find an overview of the evolution of cognitive science from the "official start", that Gardner puts at a conference in 1948 (with von Neuman and McCulloch & Lashley) to the "publication date of this paperback edition", 1986. Of course, some foundations of AI and Cognitive Science were laid before, by persons such as Turing (starting in the 1930's). And George A. Miller puts the startdate of the field in 1956 (a conference with Newell, Simon, Chomsky and Miller himself). Anyway, if you like to go deeper into this matter, these and other dates are given you by Gardner.
I read this book in 1989. It is Marvin Minky's point of view of how the mind works (Marvin Minsky is the co-founder of the A.I.Lab at MIT). The book consists of 270 one-page sections, each giving us a part of the puzzle of our brain as Minsky decomposed it.
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"Cognitive Science" Page last edited on: 16/03/01