cognitive science

interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes

AI overview

Cognitive science is the scientific study of how the mind works, bringing together insights from multiple disciplines to understand thinking, learning, and perception. It matters because understanding these mental processes helps us develop better technologies, improve education, and gain insights into human behavior and intelligence.

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Research

135,281 papers

Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science.ReviewThe Behavioral and brain sciences · 2013Clark ADOI: 10.1017/S0140525X12000477
The cognitive science of technology.ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences · 2021Stout DDOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.07.005
What happened to cognitive science?ReviewNature human behaviour · 2019Núñez R, Allen M, Gao R et al.DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0626-2
Cognitive science as complexity science.ReviewWiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2020Favela LHDOI: 10.1002/wcs.1525
Computation for cognitive science: Analog versus digital.ReviewWiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2024Maley CJDOI: 10.1002/wcs.1679
Philosophy of cognitive science in the age of deep learning.ReviewWiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2024Millière RDOI: 10.1002/wcs.1684
Networks in cognitive science.ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences · 2013Baronchelli A, Ferrer-i-Cancho R, Pastor-Satorras R et al.DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.04.010
The cognitive science of eyewitness memory.ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences · 2025Mickes L, Wilson BM, Wixted JTDOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2025.01.008

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Commons category: Cognitive science
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Article

Figure illustrating the fields that contributed to the birth of cognitive science, including philosophy of mind, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, anthropology, and psychology

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion. To understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."