Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind, intelligence, and learning, incorporating psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and artificial intelligence to understand how the brain functions and makes decisions. The field has evolved since its inception in 1956, advocating the integration of various disciplines in exploring cognitive processes, representation, and functionalism. Current research aims to connect cognitive science with biological and social sciences, particularly in areas like social robotics, while ongoing philosophical debates persist about the nature of human mentality.

1. COGNITIVE SCIENCE- Definition,
Scope and Evolution
Dr.S.Jerslin

2. DEFINITION
• Cognitive science is the study of how the mind works,
functions, and behaves.
• As a scientific field of study, cognitive science requires
applying multiple existing disciplines such as philosophy,
neuroscience, or artificial intelligence in order to
understand how the brain makes a decision or performs a
task.
• Cognitive science seeks to understand intelligence and
behavior which can help humans in many ways such as
developing educational programs or building smarter
devices.
• https://www.forcepoint.com › cyber-edu › cognitive-sci...

3. Con…
The interdisciplinary study of the mind, intelligen
ce, and learning, including research in psychology,
philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com › dictionary ›
english

4. Con…
• Cognitive science is the study of the mind, including its structure and
everything it does. It includes a variety of research sciences, including:
• Education, the study of how people learn
• Philosophy, the study of knowledge, reality, and existence
• Artificial intelligence, the study of thinking machines and systems
• Psychology, the study of behavior and the mind
• Neuroscience, the study of the nervous system
• Linguistics, the study of language
• Anthropology, the general study of the human society and culture
What is Cognitive Science? - Definition & History | Study.com
• https://study.com › Courses › Psychology Courses

5. SCOPE
• SCOPE of Cognitive Psychology: The scope of cognitive
psychology could be assumed by realizing its sub
disciplines and the effort or the work done on it.
• 1. Social/Communal Psychologists: Social psychologists
try to examine the mental process involved in thinking
about other persons.
• 2. Scientific Psychologists: Clinical psychologists
inspect the role that mental practice play in
psychopathology. (scientific study of mental disorders).
• 3. Developmental Psychologists: Developmental
psychologists examine about the ways that cognitive
procedure amend (adjust) throughout the life time.

6. Scope Con…
4. Neuropsychologists: Cognitive psychology is also connected
with neuropsychology, in which neuropsychologists stab to
understand the connotation(association) between mental
dispensation(allowance) and brain action.
• 5. Managerial Psychologists: Cognitive psychology plays its
role in manufacturing or structural set up where in
administrative psychologists are maintained to know how
cognitive procedure such as memorizing and decision-
making plans work out in administrative or industrial
workstation.
Definition and scope of Cognitive Psychology
• https://gacbe.ac.in › pdf › ematerial

7. Scope Con…
• With technical training in data analysis, programming:
Telecommunications
Medical analysis
Data representation and retrieval
Intelligence analysis
Human factors engineering
Computer-human interaction
Artificial intelligence
Human performance testing
Speech synthesis and voice recognition
Multimedia design
Linguistic analysis
• With less technical training:
Education
Marketing representative
Technical writer
Consultant

8. Con…
• Therapists
• Teachers
• Research analysts
• Product developers/designers
• UX designers
• Software developers
• Linguistic analysts
• Data analysts
• HR specialists
• Founders of their own start-ups

9. Con…
• And those looking to continue their education by getting an
advanced degree (i.e., M.A. or Ph.D.) have gone into
programs such as:
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• AI and Robotics
• Computer Engineering
• Education Neurobiology Law School
• Medical School
•
Careers in Cognitive Science - Case Western Reserve ...
• https://cognitivescience.case.edu › undergraduate › care...

10. EVOLUTION OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE
• According to the American psychologist George Miller,
cognitive science was born on September 11, 1956, the
second day of the Second Symposium on Information
Theory held at MIT.
• Miller left the symposium ‘with a strong
conviction(assurance), more intuitive(innate) than
rational(normal), that human experimental psychology,
theoretical linguistics, and the computer
simulation(imitation) of cognitive processes were all
pieces from a larger whole, and that the future would
see a progressive elaboration and coordination of their
shared concerns’ (Miller 1979).

11. Con…
• It is Miller who in 1960, together with Eugene
Galanter and Karl Pribram, authored a text that
may be considered the manifesto(proposal) of
cognitive science and that proclaimed the
encompassing(including) of cognitive psychology
within the more general framework of
information processing (Miller et al., 1960).
• The assumption was that newly born information
science could provide a unifying framework for
the study of cognitive systems (Schank and
Abelson, 1977

12. a.Representation
• From a theoretical point of view, the core of
this project is the concept
of representation. Intentional mental states,
such as beliefs and perceptions, are defined as
relations to mental representations.
• The semantic(meaning of words & sentences)
properties of mental representations explain
intentionality(purpose) (Pitt, 2017).

13. Con…
• Representations can be computed and thus
constitute the basis for some forms of logic
systems. According to the Cognitive Science
Committee (1978), which drew up a research
project for the Sloan Foundation, all those
disciplines, which belong to cognitive science,
share the common goal of investigating the
representational(physical appearance of things)
and computational capacities of the mind and
the structural and functional realization of these
capacities in the brain.

14. b. Functionalism
• This point of view constitutes the foundation for what has
been called functionalism in the philosophy of mind, i.e.,
the hypothesis that what defines the mind are those
features that are independent of its natural realization. The
classic functionalist stance(attitude) is expressed by
Pylyshyn in his book on computation and cognition
(Pylyshyn, 1984).
• He maintains that a clear distinction must be made
between the functional architecture of the cognitive
system and the rules and representations that the system
employs.
• Cognitive Science: History - William Bechtel
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu › teaching › philpsych

15. c. Symbol Grounding Problem
• Functionalism has been greatly discussed and criticized
from the beginning (Block, 1978; Dreyfus,
1979). Harnad (1990) identified what has been defined
as the symbol grounding problem: “How can the
semantic interpretation of a formal(proper) symbol
system be made intrinsic(built in) to the system?”
• This argument is particularly interesting because it is
founded on the impassable(closed) biological nature of
the mind. Neither logic nor mathematical or statistical
procedures may replace brain as a biological organ.

16. b. Behaviorism
• From another perspective, some scholars have
emphasized that functionalism leads to a new form of
behaviorism. Putnam (1988) claimed that reducing
mental processes exclusively(fully) to their functional
descriptions(images) is tantamount(equal) to describe
such processes in behavioristic terms.
• The centrality of computability(ability to solve a
problem) as the criterion for the construction of
models in cognitive science leads naturally, in Bruner’s
opinion, to abandon(discord) “meaning making,”(how
individual make sense of knowledge) which was the
central concern of the “Cognitive Revolution.”

17. • Notably, the aspect that was absent from this view of
cognitive science was learning. This lack, according
to Gentner (2010), could be partly explained as a
reaction to behaviorism, which was completely
centered on learning.
• Thus, cognitive science was born essentially as a
reaction to behaviorism and took its
legitimacy(legality) from the use of methodologies
developed within artificial intelligence. These
methodologies were supposed to make explicit how
mental representations produced human activity in
specific domains.

18. Con…
• However, this approach had a price: it separated the
mind from its biological basis and from the context in
which human activity takes place. There was no place
for development, interaction, and variation due to
biological or social causes.
• This theoretical choice explains Bruner’s disillusion. For
Bruner, cognitive science had fallen back into the
behaviorism against which it originated, and no
interesting relation could be established with
developmental psychology. Developmental psychology
is founded on the premise that a human being
develops in interaction with the physical world and the
society of other humans.

19. Conclusion
• In conclusion, we can say that cognitive science was
born as a way to renew psychology through a
privileged connection with artificial intelligence. In the
present state of research, it is social robotics that is
attempting to establish a connection with biological
sciences, psychology, and neuroscience, in order to
build into robots those functionalities that should allow
them to successfully interact with the external physical
and social world. However, the main fundamental
philosophical problems remain unchanged. One could
still argue, as Searle did, that human mentality is an
emergent feature of biological brains and no logical,
mathematical or statistical procedure can produce it.