Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Cognitive science is today pursued by, among others, neurobiologists, psy-
chologists, linguists, sociologists, computer scientists and philosophers, and every
one of these scientific circles obtains something different, valuable and useful
from it.
The efforts that contributed to the development of modern cognitive science
were mainly empirical projects. Inspired by their intention to study the nature of
the human mind, people have experimented for years on animal brains and con-
ducted other research based on empirical data about pathologies of human brains
as well as psychological observations. This led to distinguishing a specific neuro-
science with many important achievements and discoveries to date. In another area
of cognitive science, sentences assessed as correctly built were subjected to lin-
guistic analyses on the assumption that a significant part of human cognition is
contained in linguistic communication between people (every learning must be
communicated inter-subjectively), and in internal verbalisation which forms the
foundation of thought processes conducted at a certain level of abstraction. The
nature of cognitive processes was additionally clarified by artificial intelligence,
with its designs of machines or their associated programs that could undertake
cognitive activities.
Thus cognitive science started to look like a synthesis of knowledge about the
mind, including philosophical reflections on its nature, knowledge about psycho-
logical phenomena and rules governing the behaviour of people and animals,
complemented with the study of the language, the biological foundation for psy-
chological phenomena, and also making use of their cybernetic interpretation.
Thus cognitive science encompasses research on the brain and on psychological
manifestations of its operation, but also mathematical models and an engineering
approach making it possible to build a technical structure similar to a human brain
and at the same time to try to use it for teaching and improving this brain. The ba-
sic areas which cognitive science deals with are most often considered to cover
[92]:
•
the impact of mega-information on human behaviour;
•
the impact of micro-information on human behaviour;
•
the emotional modelling of human behaviour;
•
the cultural modelling of human behaviour;
•
matter vs. the spiritual world;
•
human impressions and their quality;
•
functions of the consciousness;
•
functions of the brain;
•
formal systems and the meaning of symbols;
•
neural models;
•
technical aspects of artificial intelligence;
•
mind vs. brain.
