What is Cognitive Science? Its basic ideas and stages of development

This exciting field of research ranges from philosophy of mind to computational science.

Cognitive Science is a set of studies on the mind and its processes. It formally originated in the 1950s, at the same time as the development of computer operating systems. Currently, it represents one of the areas that has had the strongest impact on the analysis of different scientific disciplines.

We will see below what Cognitive Science is and, from a tour through the history of its development, we will explain which approaches compose it.

What is Cognitive Science?

Cognitive Science is a multidisciplinary perspective on the human mindIt can be applied to other information processing systems, as long as they maintain similarities in terms of the laws that govern the processing.

Beyond being a body of knowledge with particular and distinguishable characteristics with other bodies of knowledge; Cognitive Science is a set of sciences or disciplines of scientific character. It includes, for example, philosophy of mind, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and studies in artificial intelligence, as well as some branches of anthropology.

In fact, Fierro (2011) tells us that it is probably more appropriate to call this science a "cognitive paradigm"; since it is an approach to the mental, constituted by basic principles, problems and solutions that has impacted scientific activity in different areas.

4 phases and perspectives of Cognitive Science.

Valera (cited by Fierro, 2011) speaks of four main stages in the consolidation of cognitive science. four main stages in the consolidation of cognitive scienceThe four main stages are: cybernetics, classical cognitivism, connectionism, and action-corporatization. Each of these corresponds to a stage in the development of cognitive science, but none of them has disappeared or been replaced by the next. They are theoretical approaches that coexist and are constantly problematized. We will see, following the same author, what each one is about.

1. Cybernetics

Cybernetics developed from 1940 to 1955 and is recognized as the stage in which the main theoretical tools of Cognitive Science appeared. It coincides with the appearance of the first computers and computational operating systems, which in turn laid the foundations for studies in artificial intelligence. At the same time, different theories on information processing, reasoning and communication are developed..

These operating systems were the first self-organized systems, i.e., they operated on the basis of a series of previously programmed rules. Among other things, these systems and their operation generated central questions for Cognitive Science. For example, do machines have the capacity to think and develop autonomy like human beings?

The impact specifically in psychology was decisive, since the beginning of the 20th century had been marked by the predominance of psychoanalysis. marked by the predominance of psychoanalysis and behaviorism.. The former does not focus so much on understanding "the mind", but rather "the psyche"; and the latter focuses strictly on behavior, with the result that studies on the mental were relegated, if not directly discarded.

For the Cognitive Science of the time, the interest was neither in psychic structuring nor in observable behavior. In fact, neither was it centered on the structure and anatomical functioning of the brain (which would later be recognized as the place where mental processes are generated).

He was interested, rather, in finding systems equivalent to mental activity that would make it possible to explain and even reproduce it.. The latter is concretized with the analogy of computational processing, where it is understood that the human mind works through a series of inputs (incoming messages or stimuli), and outpus (the messages or stimuli generated).

2. Classical cognitivism

This model is generated by the contributions of different experts, from computer science, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and even economics. Among other things, this period, which corresponds to the mid-1960's, consolidates the previous ideas: every type of intelligence works in much the same way as computational operating systems..

Thus, the mind was an encoder/decoder of fragments of information, which gave rise to "symbols", "mental representations" and sequentially organized processes (one first and the other later). For the same reason this model is also known as the symbolist, representationalist or sequential processing model.

Beyond studying the materials on which this is based (the hadware, which would be the brain), it is a matter of finding the algorithm that generates them (the software, which would be the mind). From this follows the following: there is an individual who, automatically following different rules, processes, represents and internally explains the information (e.g. using different symbols). (e.g. by using different symbols). And there is an environment which, functioning independently of this, can be faithfully represented by the human mind.

However, the latter began to be questioned precisely because of how the rules that would make us process information were proposed. The proposal was that these rules would lead us to manipulate a set of symbols in a specific way.. Through this manipulation, we generate and present a message to the environment.

But, an issue that this Cognitive Science model overlooked, was that these symbols mean something; thus, their mere order works to explain syntactic activity, but not semantic activity. For the same reason, it would be difficult to speak of an artificial intelligence endowed with the capacity to generate senses. In any case, its activity would be limited to logically ordering a set of symbols by means of a preprogrammed algorithm.

Moreover, if cognitive processes were a sequential system (first one thing happens and then the other), doubts remained as to how it is that we perform those tasks that require the simultaneous activity of different cognitive processes. All this will lead to the next stages of Cognitive Science.

3. Connectionism

This approach is also known as "parallel distributed processing" or "neural network processing". Among other things (such as those mentioned in the previous section), this model of the 70's arose after the classical theory failed to justify the viability of the functioning of the cognitive system in Biological terms..

Without abandoning the computational architecture model of previous periods, what this tradition suggests is that the mind does not actually function by means of sequentially organized symbols; rather, it acts by establishing different connections between the components of a complex network.

In this way it approaches the models of neural explanation of human activity and information processing: the mind functions by massive interconnections distributed along a network.. And it is the connectivity of this network that generates the rapid activation or deactivation of cognitive processes.

Beyond finding syntactic rules that follow one after the other, here processes act in parallel and are distributed rapidly to solve a task. Among the classic examples of this approach is the mechanism of pattern recognition, such as faces.

The difference between it and neuroscience is that the latter tries to discover models of mathematical and computational development of the processes carried out by the brain, both human and animal, while connectionism focuses more on studying the consequences of these models at the level of information processing and cognitive processes.

4. Embodiment-in-action

In the face of approaches strongly focused on the internal rationality of the individual, the latter approach recovers the role of the body in the development of mental processes. It emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, with the work of Merleau-Ponty in the phenomenology of perception, in which he explained how the body has an effect on the development of the mental processes. explained how the body has direct effects on mental activity..

However, in the specific field of cognitive sciences, this paradigm was introduced only in the second half of the 20th century, when some theories proposed that it was possible to modify the mental activity of machines by manipulating their bodies (no longer through a constant input of information). In the latter it was proposed that intelligent behaviors took place when the machine interacted with the environmentand not precisely because of its internal symbols and representations.

From this point on, cognitive science began to study body movements and their role in cognitive development and in the construction of the notion of agency, as well as in the acquisition of notions related to time and space. In fact, child and developmental psychology, which had shown how the first mental schemas, originated in infancy, take place after the body interacts with the environment in certain ways, began to be taken up again.

It is through the body that we are able to generate concepts related to weight (heavy, light), volume or depth, spatial location (up, down, inside, outside), and so on. This is finally articulated with theories of enaction, which propose that cognition is the result of an interaction between the mind and the body. the result of an interaction between the embodied mind and the environment, which is possible only through the interaction of the embodied mind and the environment.which is possible only through motor action.

Finally, in addition to this last stream of cognitive science, there are also the extended mind hypothesiswhich suggest that mental processes are not only in the individual, much less in the brain, but in the environment itself.

Bibliographical references:

• Fierro, M. (2012). The conceptual development of cognitive science. Part II. Revista Colombiana de Psiquiatría, 41(1): pp. 185 - 196.
• Fierro, M. (2011). The conceptual development of cognitive science. Part I. Colombian Journal of Psychiatry, 40(3): pp. 519 - 533.
• Thagard, P. (2018). Cognitive Science. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved October 04, 2018. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/#His.