The Computer and the Mind essays

The Computer and the Mind essays Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary field, comprising cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology. In recent years, cognitive science has become a predominant paradigm in studies of the mind. Cognitive science incorporates concepts and methods from philosophy, cognitive psychology etc., whereas behaviorism dominated the psychological sciences during the first part of this century. Cognitive scientists are interested in mental structures and processes of the mind. Several individuals have attempted more rigorous definitions of cognitive science. A computational view emphasizes that, cognitive science, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes implicitly, tries to elucidate the workings of the mind by treating them as computations, not necessarily of the sort that is carried out be the digital computer, but of a sort that lies within broader theory of computation (Johnson-Laird, 1988). Restrictive definitions of cognitive science however, include only one or other divergent models that cognitive scientists have developed. Early cognitive scientists viewed the mind as a processor, similar to the early digital computer. The mind was seen as a passive recipient of information, which was registered in a short-term memory, and perhaps encoded in long-term memory. More recent cognitive scientists have pointed out that the mind is a parallel processor, and have emphasized that mental structures are active and that they occur within a particular context. Such work may be excluded by a definition of cognitive science that focuses on information processing and computation. Cognitive science models typically specify cognitive architecture in one of two ways, symbolic and connectionist. The elements of symbolic systems are symbols, which are stored in associative constructs. The elements of connectionist parallel processing models have been developed. The development o...