Cognitive 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, artificial intelligence, philosophy, 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."
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.
Daydreaming is a stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when one's attention becomes focused on a more personal and internal direction.
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.
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
William Hirstein is an American philosopher primarily interested in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, cognitive science, and analytic philosophy.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Canadian-American psychologist. She is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science and co-directs the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. She has received both of the highest scientific honors in the field of psychology, the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science for 2025, and the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association for 2021. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.
Risto Kalervo Näätänen was a Finnish psychological scientist, pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and known worldwide as one of the discoverers of the electrophysiological mismatch negativity. He was a much-cited social scientist and one of the few individuals appointed permanent Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland. He retired in 2007 and retained a title of Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland. He was a professor at the University of Tartu starting in 2007.
Mind-wandering is broadly defined as thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Mind-wandering consists of thoughts that are task-unrelated and stimulus-independent. This can be in the form of three different subtypes: positive constructive daydreaming, guilty fear of failure, and poor attentional control.
Peter Carruthers is a philosopher working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program and member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.
John Terrence Cacioppo was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and was the director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. He co-founded the field of social neuroscience and was member of the department of psychology, department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and the college until his death in March 2018.
The Princeton University Department of Psychology, located in Peretsman-Scully Hall, is an academic department of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. For over a century, the department has been one of the most notable psychology departments in the country. It has been home to psychologists who have made significant scientific discoveries in psychology and neuroscience, such as adult neurogenesis in primate brains, the concept of the cognitive miser, bystander non-intervention, face-selective neurons in primate brains, feature integration theory, mental models theory, and prospect theory.
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.
Moshe Bar is an Israeli cognitive neuroscientist. He is a professor at Bar-Ilan University. He was previously head of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and before that director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Arthur Paul Shimamura was a professor of psychology and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the neural basis of human memory and cognition. He received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Larry Squire, where he studied amnesic patients. In 1989, Shimamura began his professorship at UC Berkeley. He has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, was a founding member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and has been science advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium science museum.
Michael Charles Corballis was a New Zealand and Canadian psychologist and author. He was Emeritus Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland. His fields of research were cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, encompassing visual perception, visual imagery, attention, memory, and the evolution of language.
Francesca Gabrielle Elizabeth Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. Her research concerns autism spectrum conditions, specifically the understanding social cognitive processes in these conditions.
Jonathan Schooler, is an American psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches various topics that intersect aspects of both cognitive psychology and philosophy such as: Belief in free will, Meta-awareness, Mindfulness, Mind-Wandering, Memory, Creativity, and Emotion. Schooler is also known for his sometimes controversial research on topics such as Anomalous Cognition and the decline effect.
Jonathan David Cohen is an American psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He is the Robert Bendheim and Lynn Bendheim Thoman Professor in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, where he is also the founding co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He originally joined the faculty of Princeton in 1998, and became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior in 2000. A noted expert on neuroimaging, he played a major role in increasing the use of fMRI scanners in scientific research. He has been a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science since 2007 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2012. He is a recipient of the Joseph Zubin Memorial Fund Award, the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology, and the Association for Psychological Science's William James Fellow Award.
Jonathan B. Freeman is an American psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Columbia University. He is best known for his work on the neuroscience of person perception and social cognition, as well as mouse-tracking methodology in cognitive science. His research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying split-second social judgments and their impact on behaviour.
