Cognitive Science: An Interdisciplinary Endeavor

The authors of the Sloan 1987 report describe cognitive science as a combination of six disciplines, each contributing unique techniques, tools, and frameworks for understanding the mind, while examining it from distinct perspectives and levels:

  • Philosophy: Focuses on abstract models of how the mind is realized by the brain.
  • Psychology: Investigates the mechanisms underlying cognitive performance, particularly in language and behavior.
  • Linguistics: Develops abstract models of linguistic competence, emphasizing the structure of language.
  • Anthropology: Explores the social dimensions of cognition and its variations across cultures.
  • Neuroscience: Studies the detailed workings of the brain to understand cognitive processes.
  • Artificial Intelligence: Abstracts away from biological details to create computer models and simulations of human cognitive abilities.

The author claims that the hexagon diagram in the report is not a good model, because the cognitive science is indeed a unified enterprise. It has its own distinctive problems, distinctive techniques, and its own distinctive explanatory frameworks.

Levels of Explanation: The Contrast between Psychology and Neuroscience

Scientific psychology (as opposed to much of what is classified as psychology in bookstores) includes cognitive psychology, social psychology, abnormal psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, personality psycology, and so on.

  • there is a continuity of methodology across the different specializations and subfields. Students are required to take a course in research methods, covering basic principles of experimental design, hypothesis formation and testing, and data analysis that are common to all branches.
  • many of these branches of psychology operate at the same level. The data from which they begin are data about cognitive performance and behavior at the level of the whole organism.

There are many branches of neuroscience, but they are not related in the same way. The levels of organization that neuroscience studies are illustrated in the following figure, drawn from Gordon Shepherd’s 1994 textbook Neurobiology:

Common tools in neuroscience research includes:

The challenge of cognitive science

The aim of cognitive science as an intellectual enterprise is to provide a framework that makes explicit the common ground between all the different academic disciplines that study the mind and that shows how they are related to each other.

An analogy can be drawn from physics: just as many theoretical physicists seek a unified Theory of Everything, cognitive science—on this view—seeks a unified Theory of Cognition.

The investigation within cognitive science spans three key dimensions:

  • The cognitive, sensory, or motor domain under study
  • The tools or methods employed (e.g., experimental techniques, computational models, neuroimaging)
  • The levels of organization (ranging from neural mechanisms to behavioral processes and complex cognitive phenomena)