Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that studies the mind and its processes, including how the mind represents and manipulates knowledge and how mental representations and processes are realized in the brain. It is a scientific field of study that requires applying multiple existing disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology to understand how the brain makes decisions or performs tasks. The goal of cognitive science is to understand and formulate the principles of intelligence with the hope that this will lead to a better comprehension of the mind and of learning.
Cognitive science emerged as an intellectual movement in the 1950s, often referred to as the cognitive revolution. It is an interdisciplinary field with contributors from various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, and biology. Cognitive scientists work collectively in hope of understanding the mind and its interactions with the surrounding world much like other sciences do.
Cognitive science incorporates a variety of perspectives and methodologies, and cognitive scientists share the central goal of characterizing the structure of human intellectual functioning. Some examples of cognitive study include attention span and capacity, memory, perception, language, and problem-solving. Cognitive science can be taken as an object of investigation in the philosophy of science, generating reflections on the nature of mind and intelligence.
