INTRODUCTION

Here is a short, but accurate, definition of cognitive science: Cognitive science is the science of the mind. Much of this book is devoted to explaining what this means. As with any area of science, cognitive scientists have a set of problems that they are trying to solve and a set of phenomena that they are trying to model and explain. These problems and phenomena are part of what makes cognitive science a distinctive discipline. Equally important, cognitive scientists share a number of basic assumptions about how to go about tackling those problems. They share a very general conception of what the mind is and how it works. The most fundamental driving assumption of cognitive science is that minds are information processors. As we will see, this basic idea can be developed in many different ways, since there are many different ways of thinking about what information is and how it might be processed by the mind.

The chapters in this first section of the book introduce the picture of the mind as an information processor by sketching out some of the key moments in the history of cognitive science. Each chapter is organized around a selection of influential books and articles that illustrate some of the important concepts, tools, and models that we will be looking at in more detail later on in the book.