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Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Theodor Fechner, who first initiated psychology un-
derstood as a separate science [92].
Of the many fields of psychology in existence today, this topic will refer
mainly to cognitive science, an experimental discipline of knowledge studying
various manifestations of the cognitive activity of the mind. When cognition and
understanding moved from the domain of poetic metaphors to scientific explora-
tion, it halfway became a typical research subject, though difficult to theoretically
conceptualise and empirically test. It soon became clear that the scientific research
of cognitive science problems required the involvement of many disciplines, so re-
searchers tried extending the scientific approach to studying the mind. This was
helped by the appearance of computational disciplines, including cybernetics
(Norbert Wiener) [150], [151], information science (John von Neumann) [140],
[141], artificial intelligence (John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Lotfi A. Zadeh)
[71], [76]-[78], [154]-[157], as well as broad-ranging research of the brain (Don-
ald Olding Hebb, David Hubel, Torsten Nils Wiesel) [42], [43], [47], [48] and
theories of generative grammars in linguistics or of formal grammars (Noam
Chomsky) [19], [20].
Fig. 1.4.
Scientific disciplines making up cognitive science
Cognitive science straddled the borders of various scientific disciplines (Fig. 1.4)
which formed its foundations, which inspired it, and on whose basis it started devel-
oping and gaining in importance.
It was quickly noted that the results obtained in individual disciplines were im-
portant not just for the narrow group of specialised researchers, but that a new,
unusually original subject was arising, which could be defined as a systemic per-
spective on the mind, which treated cognition and understanding as a multi-stage
computational process. In the cognitive science view, every mental process is
treated as information processing. This processing is then characterised as parallel
and distributed, as this is exactly how information is handled in systems having
