Cognitive Science An Introduction to the Science of the Mind

Introduction

Investigating the interdisciplinary origins of cognitive science in Part I highlighted a theme that was one of the guiding ideas in this new discipline and throughout the book – that cognition is a form of information processing. Part II reinforced this theme by examining the integration challenge, and proposed thinking about this challenge in terms of different mental architectures. A mental architecture is a way of thinking about the overall organization of the mind in terms of different cognitive systems, together with a model of how information is processed within and across these systems. In Part III we explored different models of information processing, focusing on both the computer-inspired physical symbol hypothesis and the neurally inspired artificial neural networks approach. Part IV explored the concept of modularity, the idea that many information-processing tasks are carried out by specialized sub-systems (modules).