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.

(Gopnik, 1996, p. 485)

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

Two books that (in my opinion) provide a great introduction to Cognitive Science; the first focuses on the investigation of human causal learning, and the second on the broader history of the discipline(s).

Talks