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Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. 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. 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."
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial intelligence to build more intelligent machines. Connectionism presents a cognitive theory based on simultaneously occurring, distributed signal activity via connections that can be represented numerically, where learning occurs by modifying connection strengths based on experience.
A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models, and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set of equations to software programs that interact with the same tools that humans use to complete tasks.
ACT-R is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson and Christian Lebiere at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.
The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.
Dynamical systems theory is an area of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex dynamical systems, usually by employing differential equations or difference equations. When differential equations are employed, the theory is called continuous dynamical systems. From a physical point of view, continuous dynamical systems is a generalization of classical mechanics, a generalization where the equations of motion are postulated directly and are not constrained to be Euler–Lagrange equations of a least action principle. When difference equations are employed, the theory is called discrete dynamical systems. When the time variable runs over a set that is discrete over some intervals and continuous over other intervals or is any arbitrary time-set such as a Cantor set, one gets dynamic equations on time scales. Some situations may also be modeled by mixed operators, such as differential-difference equations.
Neurophilosophy or philosophy of neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy that explores the relevance of neuroscientific studies to the arguments traditionally categorized as philosophy of mind. The philosophy of neuroscience attempts to clarify neuroscientific methods and results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.
Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
John Robert Anderson is a Canadian-born American psychologist. He is currently professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Neuroconstructivism is a theory that states that phylogenetic developmental processes such as gene–gene interaction, gene–environment interaction and, crucially, ontogeny all play a vital role in how the brain progressively sculpts itself and how it gradually becomes specialized over developmental time.
Developmental cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary scientific field devoted to understanding psychological processes and their neurological bases in the developing organism. It examines how the mind changes as children grow up, interrelations between that and how the brain is changing, and environmental and biological influences on the developing mind and brain.
Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
Mriganka Sur is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and N.R. Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research at the Centre for Computational Brain Research, IIT Madras. He was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2010 and has been serving as Jury Chair from 2018.
Marcel Just is D. O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research uses brain imaging (fMRI) in high-level cognitive tasks to study the neuroarchitecture of cognition. Just's areas of expertise include psycholinguistics, object recognition, and autism, with particular attention to cognitive and neural substrates. Just directs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging and is a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU.
Bayesian approaches to brain function investigate the capacity of the nervous system to operate in situations of uncertainty in a fashion that is close to the optimal prescribed by Bayesian statistics. This term is used in behavioural sciences and neuroscience and studies associated with this term often strive to explain the brain's cognitive abilities based on statistical principles. It is frequently assumed that the nervous system maintains internal probabilistic models that are updated by neural processing of sensory information using methods approximating those of Bayesian probability.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognitive features include high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built into the organism's functional structure.
Gustavo Deco is an Argentinian and Italian professor and scientist. He serves as Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Full Professor (Catedratico) at the Pompeu Fabra University, where he is Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition and head of the Computational Neuroscience Group. In 2001 Deco was awarded the international prize of Siemens "Inventor of the Year" for his contributions in statistical learning, models of visual perception, and fMRI based diagnosis of neuropsychiatric diseases..
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.
References
- Just, M. A., & Varma, S. (2007). The organization of thinking: What functional brain imaging reveals about the neuroarchitecture of complex cognition. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7(3), 153-191.