Cognitive Science
A collection of resources for people interested in/wanting to learn more about Cognitive Science.
Note that my own primary focus lies on what some call “developmental cognitive science,” hence some of the content below will reflect this preference :-)
If you are new to all this, you may be wondering: “What is (developmental) cognitive science, anyway? Is it just another word for developmental psychology?” I personally like to think of it as a particular approach to thinking about cognitive development, which is well captured by the following quote:
The fundamental idea of cognitive science is that the brain is a kind of computer designed by evolution to perform particular cognitive functions. The promise of developmental cognitive science is that we can discover the computational processes that underlie development.
(Gopnik & Wellman, 2012, p. 4)
And another quote by Alison Gopnik I really like:
[...] specifying the parallels between cognitive development and science not only can help us to understand cognitive development, it also can help us to understand science itself. The moral of my story is not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children. Scientists and children both employ the same particularly powerful and flexible set of cognitive devices. These devices enable scientists and children to develop genuinely new knowledge of the world around them.
If you’re interested in cognitive development specifically, you may be wondering what use or “value” there may be to the related research. Personally, I find Steve Croker’s (2012) view on this very compelling:
Why do we study cognitive development?
There are a number of reasons why we might be interested in cognitive development. First, there are theoretical reasons. We might be interested in epistemology – the study of knowledge. We might want to know what knowledge is and where it comes from. This is a philosophical question, but it can be addressed by looking at development. We might be interested in evolution because we are interested in how human cognition evolved. It may be that by examining the development of the individual, we can gain some insight into the development of cognition within the human species. Or, we may want to enrich our understanding of adult cognition by looking at how cognitive processes develop. Perhaps we choose to study cognitive development simply because we want to. Studying any topic for its own sake is a perfectly good reason!
Second, there are practical reasons. We may want to apply the results of research to facilitating children’s mental growth. To this end we may be interested in evaluating the impact of television, books and computer games on cognitive development. We may want to inform educational practice, or we may be interested in the diagnosis and treatment of childhood disorders. However, in applying the results of research, we must tread with caution. There are often a number of possible interpretations of child data and there may be disagreement as to whether a study supports a particular theory of development. This is why critical evaluation of both theory and research is important.
Helpful Links
- Samuel Gershman's advice on getting started in CogSci: https://gershmanlab.com/docs/Getting_started_cogsci.pdf
- Susan Carey on becoming a cognitive scientist: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-040622-091723
- Reading recommendations by Shari Liu (MIT/JHU)
Books
