What Is Cognitive Science

What is cognitive science?   A scientific explanation would be “the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.” (1) But what does that mean, cognitive science has been quitely growing since ancient Greece when philosphers debated and struggled to uderstand the questions what is the mind, and what is knowing.   Philosepher are still debating that question even today, however in the mid 1950’s while the psychological world was dominated by the likes of Skinner and Watson and their behavorist models of learning cognitive science made its debut.   At the forefront of the field were three primary theorists; Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Pieaget.   With their theories human learning was no longer thought of as stimulus response, but instead as a product of the mind not bound to a reinforcer or punisher.  
Jerome Bruner began working on his theories for cognitive science in the 1940’s and on some of the works he developed still influence us today.   The basis for learing from Bruner is that people tend to learn through disovery, were we aquire new information based largely on our own efforts, as opposed to the behaviorist theory that we require some kind of stimulus in order to learn.   “Bruner's work in cognitive psychology led to an interest in the cognitive development of children and related issues of education, and in the 1960s he developed a theory of cognitive growth.” (2) In this theory he developed three stages in which humans develop, the first Enactive representaion where young children will express their world in terms of sensation or action.   The next stage, Iconic representation we develop representative icons that we use to understand the world, for example a child may develop an icon for ‘dog’ all and thus all four legged creatures that appear similar to this icon of ‘dog’ shall be henceforth called dog by the child.   The last stage Bruner... [continues]

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