Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of thought, perception, learning, language, and other mental processes. It explains cognition through evidence and theories from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and related fields.

Perception: Perception is the organization and interpretation of sensory information into representations of objects and events. It connects incoming sensory signals to the representations cognitive science studies.
Computational theory of mind: The computational theory of mind models mental processes as computations over representations. It offers a framework for explaining thought as structured information processing.
Cognitive revolution: The cognitive revolution was a mid-twentieth-century shift toward studying internal mental processes in psychology and related fields. It established cognition as a scientific target after behaviorism's dominance.
Psycholinguistics: Psycholinguistics studies the mental processes involved in producing, understanding, and acquiring language. It applies cognitive theories and experiments to how language is processed.
Consciousness: Consciousness is the state or capacity of having subjective experience or awareness. Explaining how physical processes relate to subjective experience remains a major challenge.
Attention: Attention is the selective prioritization of information for processing, awareness, or action. Its limits help explain why cognition selects some information while neglecting other input.
Connectionism: Connectionism models cognition using networks of simple units whose learned connections produce complex behavior. Its distributed networks contrast with accounts built around explicit symbolic rules.
Behaviorism: Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that emphasizes observable behavior and learning while rejecting or limiting explanations based on unobserved mental states. Its restrictions helped provoke renewed scientific study of internal mental processes.
Cognitive neuroscience: Cognitive neuroscience investigates the neural basis of mental processes using methods such as brain imaging and lesion studies. It tests cognitive explanations against evidence about brain activity and structure.
Hard problem of consciousness: The hard problem of consciousness asks why and how physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. It sharpens the question of whether cognitive mechanisms explain experience itself.

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