Cognitive science

In its broadest and most ambitious goal, the academic discipline of cognitive science aims to explain the physiological activity of thinking and feeling, of speaking and other ways in which humans process symbols, of imagining and remembering, of learning and knowing, of experiencing events of reality consciously, non-consciously and unconsciously, of reasoning and problem-solving, of dreaming, and a host of other physiological activities that we associate with an aspect of the human living system that we refer to as mind.

The University of California at Berkeley offers an undergraduate degree-granting major in ‘Cognitive Science’, and explains the discipline as follows:

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field that has arisen during the past decade at the intersection of a number of existing disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and physiology. The shared interest that has produced this coalition is understanding the nature of the mind. This quest is an old one, dating back to antiquity in the case of philosophy, but new ideas are emerging from the fresh approach of Cognitive Science. Previously, each discipline sought to understand the mind from its own perspective, benefiting little from progress in other fields because of different methods employed. With the advent of Cognitive Science, however, common interests and theoretical ideas have overcome methodological differences, and interdisciplinary interaction has become the hallmark of this field.

Notably, though the "….shared interest that has produced this coalition is understanding the nature of the mind", the complete webpage purporting to answer the question, “What is Cognitive Science?”, presumes comprehension of the word (or concept of) "mind".

William Bechtel and George Graham, in the introduction to their multi-authored text, A Companion to Cognitive Science, define cognitive science as follows:

The expression 'cognitive science' names a broadly integrated class of approaches to the study of mental activities and processes, broad not just in the sense of including disciplines as varied as philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and neuroscience, but in the sense that cognitive scientists tend to adopt certain basic, general assumptions about mind and intelligent thought and behavior. These include assumptions that the mind is (1) an information processing system, (2) a representational device, and (3) [in some sense] a computer. Various relations are possible among each of these assumptions; further, they are not shared by all who dub themselves cognitive scientists. Partly because of such relations and failures of uniformity, cognitive science has generated vigorous dialogues concerning the nature of mental activities and processes as well as over the nature of science and the structure of disciplines.

Harvard University offers a webpage promoting a book by cognitive scientist, Phillip Johnson-Laird that states:

The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.

Margaret Boden’s 2006 book, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, views the mind as a machine, though a special one.

If special, perhaps because mind "emerged" from the interaction of molecular subsystems. Noam Chomsky has stated that "....the evolution of language may involve 'emergence' — the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization."

If so, [Chomsky continues] it would be an interesting, but by no means novel, case of evolution. A similar view is widely held by evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists, for example, Ian Tattersall, who suggests more generally that human intelligence is an "emergent quality, the result of a chance combination of factors, rather than a product of Nature's patient and gradual engineering over the eons" [citation]. Still more generally, neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, introducing an American Academy of Arts and Sciences collection of essays on the state of the art at the conclusion of "the decade of the brain" that ended the last century, formulates the leading principle of these contributions as the thesis that "Things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains [my emphasis], . . . produced by principles . . . we do not yet understand" -- and that might derive from laws of nature [citation].

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers these introductory words: Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.

It seems that like most other sciences, cognitive science requires a multi-disciplinary approach to try to explain the workings of what we commonly recognize as 'mind', and that it centrally focuses on explaining exactly what we mean by mind, how we view it, what theories we have about it.

Whatever theories we come up with, it seems that we come up with them with our minds. If minds operate as machines, like all machines, to explain their workings we must take both a reductionist approach — looking at its parts — and a holistic approach — looking at it as a whole — and integrating the two approaches to yield a satisfying explanation that has predictive power, and ultimately controlling power — self-controling power.

We begin, then, with an exploration of the concepts of mind that minds have proposed.

Theories of mind

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Applied cognitive science and engineering

One of the lesser-known branches of psychology, cognitive psychology deals, significantly, with people not in distress, but trying to move to a higher level of functioning. The discipline deals with how people interact with new concepts in their environment, especially with respect to learning, or the mental processes involved in building skills. These topics are also the foundation on which human factors engineering, instructional technology, and user interface design are built.

Much of the discipline deals with the conscious processes involved in learning, and in processing information that comes from existing and new sources. Bruning defined the cognitive movement as going beyond Skinner's stimulus-response, reflexive behaviorism into conscious learning.

Cognitive psychology is a theoretical perspective that focuses on the realms of human perception, thought, and memory. It portrays learners as active processors of information--a metaphor borrowed from the computer world--and assigns critical roles to the knowledge and perspective students bring to their learning. What learners do to enrich information, in the view of cognitive psychology, determines the level of understanding they ultimately achieve. — Roger H. Bruning

While Hofstetter describes a fundamental paradigm shift, experience in gaining certain skills may also draw from the behaviorists. "If faculty members can learn to shift their pedagogical paradigm from teacher-dominated to learner-centered, students will become more actively involved in the teaching and learning process. "At the end of a course, instead of having been trained in the digestion of existing knowledge, students will have become able to continue finding, judging, critiquing, synthesizing, and constructing new knowledge... students will have become truly educated, not just trained." Nevertheless, to take the quite different example of flying an advanced combat aircraft, developing the eye-hand coordination to merge the pilot's vision outside supplemented heads-up displays and pilot-selected "glass cockpit" displays, which are controlled from buttons and switches on controls operated without looking at them, can take a year increasingly of simulator and aircraft experience. While this may have behaviorist aspects, it is complemented by highly interactive classroom work on alternative tactics, emergency procedures, and the theory of one's aircrft and weapons. In contrast, cognitive psychologists involved in automobile safety suggest that adding heads-up displays to cars, without a very explicit training program, may cause information overload in the untrained driver.

Information and decision flow in the OODA paradigm

John Boyd, one of the pioneers of high-speed decisionmaking in the modern military, has a cognitive model at the core of his theories, the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one's opponent.

Boyd theorized that multilevel contexts, such as the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war, can be modeled with a hierarchy of OODA loops (see below). He also argued that fast OODA loops require a highly decentralized command and control using mission-type orders, or directive control (i.e., what the commander wants to see happen) as opposed to detailed control (i.e., how the commander wants things done. Such a structure, according to Boyd, would create a flexible "organic whole" that would be quicker to adapt to rapidly changing situations. He noted, however, that any such highly decentralized organization would necessitate a high degree of mutual trust and a common outlook that came from prior shared experiences. Headquarters needs to know that the troops are perfectly capable of forming a good plan for taking a specific objective, and the troops need to know that Headquarters does not direct them to achieve certain objectives without good reason.

The OODA model of decision and action, originally for air-to-air fighter combat, has four phases. This discussion adds interaction with intelligence and command.

1. Observe: become aware of a threat or opportunity
2. Orient: put the observation into the context of other information; form one's perspective and situational awareness
3. Decide: make the best possible action plan that can be carried out in a timely manner
4. Act: carry out the decision.

After the action, the actor observes again, to see the effects of the action. If the cycle works properly, the actor has initiative, and can orient, decide, and act even faster in the second and subsequent iterations of the Boyd loop.

Ever-faster Boyd loops

Eventually, if the Boyd process works as intended, the actor will "get inside the opponent's loop". When the actor's Boyd cycle dominates the opponent's, the actor is acting repeatedly, based on reasoned choices, while the opponent is still trying to understand what is happening.

Modes of learning

Individual human beings differ in the way they best learn new information. One common distinction uses:

• visual: accepting input through vision, testing action through writing and drawing
• auditory: receiving spoken input and refining it through discussion
• tactile: absorbing information through highly eye-hand interactive interfaces or developing physical skills, improving the skill by interaction.

There is an unfortunate trend, in areas such as industry-specific skills and certification training, to overemphasize the tactile, and insisting that as much learning as possible be "hands on". That may be realistic for computer configuration and troubleshooting, but design skills tend to be visual and collaborative, expressed through drawings, drafting documents, and discussion.

Another unfortunate trend is to recognize that some people learn from all these methods, so, whether individual remote instruction or the classroom, multimedia presentation is important -- but, ideally, it should be possible to select the delivery mode. Auditory or visual input may be useless to people with disorders of the ears or eyes.

Depending on the topic, however, the learner may need a theoretical base for what is presented in the multimedia experience, but, even there, the learning should be participatory. Lecturers who frequently turn to the class with questions and followup discussion, using their expertise to stay on track, encourage original thought. Such thought is reinforced with frequent individual and team exercises that require synthesis of concepts, often with multimedia or interpersonal interaction.

Patterns of creating knowledge

Sometimes called a trend to "big science", many fundamental research problems are sufficiently complex to need a team effort. In areas such as particle physics and space science, it will take a mixture of skills simply to conduct the experiments.

Collaboration, however, may be a key part of learning and creating. As mentioned above, some classroom experiences deliberately include team exercises. A review of scientific publication showed the greatest growth in research by three authors

Cognitive traps

Within the United States intelligence community and other areas where decisions must be made on incomplete knowledge, there is ever-growing awareness that cognitive errors come from poorly structured cognition and lack of collaboration.