Established | 1979 |
---|---|
Type | Scientific Society |
Key people | Adele Goldberg, Chair (2022–2024) |
Website | cognitivesciencesociety.org |
The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society promotes scientific interchange among researchers in disciplines comprising the field of cognitive science, including artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and education. [1] The Society is a member of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
The group sponsors the annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, a meeting which hosts the latest theories and data from cognitive science researchers, for which it also publishes proceedings. [2] The first meeting of the conference was held in 1979 at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California.
The society was incorporated in 1979 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. It currently has over 1,500 members, including a significant number from countries other than the United States. [3]
The Cognitive Science Society annually hosts the award symposium for the David E. Rumelhart Prize, which is given to individuals or teams who have made a significant contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition. [4]
The Society also elects Fellow members based on sustained and significant impact on the cognitive science community. [5]
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."
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP. The conference is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out.
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks. He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of several books, including the technical Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, and The Book of Why, a book on causality aimed at the general public.
Paul Smolensky is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond Washington.
Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence.
James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the large increase in scientific interest in connectionism in the 1980s.
Aravind Krishna Joshi was the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the computer science department of the University of Pennsylvania. Joshi defined the tree-adjoining grammar formalism which is often used in computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
The David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition was founded in 2001 in honor of the cognitive scientist David Rumelhart to introduce the equivalent of a Nobel prize for cognitive science. It is awarded annually to "an individual or collaborative team making a significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition". The annual award is presented at the Cognitive Science Society meeting, where the recipient gives a lecture and receives a check for $100,000. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the next year's award winner is announced. The award is funded by the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation.
Linda B. Smith is a professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Smith earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977.
David Everett Rumelhart was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
John Robert Anderson is a Canadian-born American psychologist. He is currently professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Jeffrey Locke Elman was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks.
The Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) is a professional organization in North America that promotes discussion and research at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and cognitive science. Its stated purpose is "to promote interaction between philosophers, psychologists and other cognitive scientists on issues of common concern." To this end, it organizes an annual conference, maintains a listserve, and awards research prizes.
Lila Ruth Gleitman was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.