Cognitive Science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. The fundamental concept 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."

Simply put: Cognitive Science is the interdisciplinary study of cognition in humans, animals, and machines. It encompasses the traditional disciplines of psychology, computer science, neuroscience, linguistics and philosophy. The goal of cognitive science is to understand the principles of intelligence with the hope that this will lead to better comprehension of the mind and of learning and to develop intelligent devices. The cognitive sciences began as an intellectual movement in the 1950s often referred to as the cognitive revolution.

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