INTRODUCTION

The chapters in Part I highlighted some of the key landmarks in the development of cognitive science. We saw how the foundations for cognitive science were laid in psychology, linguistics, and mathematical logic. We looked at three key studies that helped to establish cognitive science as a field of study in the 1970s. These studies provided different perspectives on the idea that the mind could be modeled as a form of digital computer. In their different ways, they each reflected a single basic assumption. This is the assumption that, just as we can study computer software without studying the hardware that runs it, so too can we study the mind without directly studying the brain. As we saw in Chapter 3, however, cognitive science has moved away from this confidence that the brain is irrelevant. Cognitive scientists are increasingly coming to the view that cognitive science has to be bottom-up as well as top-down. Our theories of what the mind does have to co-evolve with our theories of how the brain works.

Two themes were particularly prominent in Part I. The first was the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science. Cognitive science draws upon a range of different academic disciplines and seeks to combine many different tools and techniques for studying the mind. This interdisciplinarity reflects the different levels of organization at which the mind and the nervous system can be studied. The second theme was the idea that cognition is a form of information processing.