What is cognitive science?

Six fields, one question

Each founding discipline brought its own tools. Psychology brought controlled experiments on memory, attention, and reasoning. Linguistics brought formal theories of how language is structured and acquired. Philosophy brought centuries of argument about what thought and meaning even are. Computer science and early artificial intelligence brought the idea that mental processes might be described as computation — information being transformed by rules, not just neurons firing. Neuroscience brought the physical substrate: the brain tissue where all of this actually happens. Anthropology brought a check against parochialism, asking whether "how humans think" secretly meant "how a fairly narrow slice of humans think." The Cognitive Science Society's own framing adds a seventh, more recent addition to this list: education, reflecting how much of the field's research feeds directly back into how people are taught.

Where the field's institutions came from

The intellectual roots go back to the mid-1950s, when researchers across several of these disciplines started taking seriously the idea that thought could be studied as information processing rather than only as behavior or introspection. The field didn't formalize into an institution until two decades later: the journal Cognitive Science published its first issue in January 1977, and the Cognitive Science Society was incorporated in 1979, the same year its first annual conference was held in La Jolla, California. Today the Society publishes two journals — Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science — and continues to run that same annual meeting, now called CogSci.

Where to go deeper

This page is deliberately short. For a genuinely thorough introduction, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on cognitive science is written by a philosopher of science who has worked in the field for decades, and MIT's Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a free, continually growing, peer-reviewed reference — the closest thing the field has to an up-to-date textbook, written article by article. Both are better starting points than anything we could republish here.