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What is cognitive science?
Cognitive science is the study of the mind from many different perspectives.
A computer scientist might study how to replicate human behaviour on a computer. By teaching a computer to think can we better understand how we think?
A psychologist might study the way brain activity produces certain kinds of mental states. What is happening in the brain when we learn new things?
A philosopher might study the nature of knowledge. How can we know something is either true or false, or perhaps both true and false?
A linguist might study the nature of language and its connection to knowledge. Is it possible to think without words?
What all these areas have in common is that they are studying some aspect of human cognition. They are working on similar questions, such as “What does it mean to be human?” or “How do we understand our world?” Where these fields meet to study and answer these questions is cognitive science. In particular, cognitive science pursues a variety of scientific and philosophical approaches to understanding human cognition.
Cognitive science has its historic roots in the work of philosophers René Descartes and Julien de la Mettrie who were the first to suggest that the mind is like a machine, and asked, 'How does it work?'. Modern cognitive science is rooted in the work of artificial intelligence researchers like Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, philosophers like Alan Turing, linguists like Noam Chomsky, psychologists like George Miller, and many others. These researchers in the mid-20th century started to study how we take in information in the world and use it to produce intelligent behaviour. Common to their work were theories of mind based on complex representations and computational methods. Crossing disciplinary boundaries they now looked to each others' work for inspiration.
Cognitive scientists get to be creative in the questions they ask, and the methods they use to answer them. There isn't a single approach that defines the field. More often than not, the different approaches are complementary rather than competitive. They all get at some aspect of human nature and our relation to the world.
As an example of cognitive science research, SFU is home to the McDonnell Project in the Neurosciences, headed by Dr. Kathleen Akins, that looks into the nature of colour vision. Most species see the world in dichromatic vision, perceiving only brightness and saturation, but humans are one of the few species that perceive different wavelengths of light as colour. The research answered important questions about the biological basis of colour vision, how it is implemented in the brain, how it evolved, and what it says about the world. In addition, Dr. Akins continues to study the biological basis of self-identity – how we perceive ourselves doing things in the world and what it says about the relation between the mind and brain.
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What will a cognitive science degree involve?
Cognitive science undergraduates take a variety of courses in computing science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The program can be tailored to a student’s interests; the Program Planners page describes how to plan your degree. Check out Course Descriptions for a detailed account of the courses a student can choose from. At the intermediate and upper levels, students focus on and take classes in three of these four streams. Additionally, the program has four COGS courses students must take. See the Course Descriptions page to get an idea of the types of courses you can expect to take, and see the Program Planners page to find out specific course requirements.
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