Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind, in which the concepts and methods of artificial intelligence (AI) are central (Boden forthcoming). The most prominent disciplines within the field are AI, artificial life (A-life), psychology, linguistics, computational neuroscience, and philosophy—especially the philosophy of mind and language. Cognitive anthropology is included too, though often goes unseen under the label of evolutionary psychology.
The many relevant subfields include robotics, whether classical, situated, or evolutionary; studies of enactive vision, where the organism's own movements (of eyes and/or body) provide crucial information for acting in the world; the psychology of human-computer interaction, including various aspects of virtual reality such as avatars; and computational theories of literature, art, music, and scientific discovery. Nonhuman minds are studied by computational ethology and neuroethology, and by A-life.
Who Is a Cognitive Scientist?
Not everyone working in the key disciplines is a cognitive scientist. Only those taking a computational approach to questions about mind are considered cognitive scientists.
Some AI workers, for example, are not cognitive scientists because they have no theoretical interest in human thought. Their aim is to challenge their ingenuity as computer engineers by getting a program or robot to do a task that people either cannot do or do not want to do.
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