What is cognitive science?
Six disciplines, one set of questions, and the courses in which each of them is taught here.
Six disciplines, one set of questions, and the courses in which each of them is taught here.
Cognitive science studies the cognitive abilities: perception, memory, intelligence, communication. The definition is close to circular, which is part of its charm; the substance of the field lies in how those abilities came to be studied together.
The arrangement dates from the middle of the last century, when mathematicians and engineers began working on questions that had belonged to psychology, philosophy and linguistics. Something of the confidence of that period survives in a project run at MIT in the summer of 1966, which set a student the task of building a system that could describe what a camera saw. The work was expected to take a vacation. Six decades later it is still going on, because vision, memory and the understanding of a sentence had turned out to be far larger problems than anyone had budgeted for, and larger than any one department could hold.
The field has been organised around that discovery ever since. Six disciplines take part, each keeping its own methods and its own standards of evidence, and each meeting the others on problems that none of them can settle alone. The questions have changed less than the instruments available for answering them, which now include eye-trackers and EEG, corpora running to billions of words, imaging that follows blood through a working brain, and models large enough to surprise the people who trained them.
Each of the six contributes a method the others lack. Under every one, three of our courses, each linking to what it covers and who teaches it.
Language is the most intricate thing most people do without noticing. Linguistics asks what a speaker knows when they know a language, and how much of that knowledge is held below the level of report.
The discipline that insists on measurement: how long it takes to recognise a face, what is lost first when memory fails, and where introspection turns out to be an unreliable guide.
Thinking happens in tissue, which turns the question into one of structures, of signals, and of the timescales on which they act.
A working model is the strictest test a theory of thinking can be put to, and building one usually reveals which parts of the theory were doing no work.
The oldest of the six, and the one that keeps the hardest questions open: what would count as an explanation of consciousness, and how would we recognise one if we had it?
Minds are formed somewhere, among particular people, under particular conditions. Anthropology is what keeps the field from mistaking one of them for all of them.
Six was never a fixed number. Mathematicians, biologists, sociologists and researchers in education have all been drawn in by problems that would not stay inside a single department, and a cognitive science programme in Zagreb, Vienna or Osnabrück will not assemble quite the same set.
Ours is an MA in Applied Cognitive Science, which adds a second question to the first: once there is an account of how minds work, what can be built with it? Six areas in which the answer matters.
Search, translation, dialogue, speech. Each needs a working account of how meaning is carried, and each fails in ways a linguist finds informative.
EEG, eye movements, muscle activity, heart rate. Turning a noisy trace from a living body into a defensible claim is a craft of its own.
Vision looks effortless until someone tries to build it. Robotics and medical imaging both work in the gap between what a camera records and what an observer understands.
How people learn is an empirical question, with immediate consequences for classrooms, for training, and for the software that increasingly mediates both.
Ideas are produced by groups, under constraints, inside organisations. That is a cognitive process too, and it can be studied and improved.
A model makes a theory precise enough to be wrong in a useful way. These courses cover building them, fitting them to data, and judging what a result is worth.
Ours is the MA in Applied Cognitive Science, taught jointly by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb.
The programme page sets out how it is put together, who teaches on it, and how to apply.
