Bermúdez (2023) Introduction: The Challenge of Cognitive Science

What is Cognitive Science?

Cognitive Science describes the interdisciplinary study of human cognition. These disciplines include psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and anthropology (See Fig. 1). The main idea here is that each of these disciplines brings about its own tools, techniques, and perspectives, and while each is necessary, they are by themselves insufficient for a complete picture of human cognition.

Fig. 1 Core disciplines of Cognitive Science (Sloan report 1978, see Gardner (1985))

That being said, there are some arguments that Fig. 1 isn't a good representation of cognitive science. Fig. 1 suggests that rather than seeing cognitive science as an area of study in its own right, it's simply a result of combining the work from different disciplines.

This is illustrated in Miller's (2003) account of the origins of the Sloan report (that produced Fig. 1), where experts from the different disciplines simply summarised findings from their field before sending them off to be combined with those from other disciplines in a post hoc manner. In other words, there are separate cognitive sciences, but no unified cognitive science. Can cognitive science be viewed as its own unique enterprise? Bermúdez argues that it can, and this is one question that will be explored in the rest of the book. But first, we take a quick look at the scope of cognitive science.

Different levels of explanations

Bermúdez explores the range and scope of cognitive science by outlining the differences between psychology and neuroscience. One way of seeing this difference is through the varying levels of explanations both sciences employ to account for the phenomenon of interest. Typically, psychology is interested in different capacities and functions of the organism as a whole. The different branches of psychology are then split according to the kind of capacity you're studying (See Fig. 2). Interested in general cognitive abilities like perception, attention, and memory? Welcome to cognitive psychology. Interested in the development of these capacities? Developmental psychology! Interested in how these capacities are developed, refined, and put to use in high-pressure scenarios? Sport psychology might be for you! Crucially, the argument here is that regardless of what kind of psychology you're interested in, they all appeal to the same level of explanation - one that takes the organism as the unit of analysis.

Fig. 2 Examples of branches in psychology (Bermúdez, 2023)

Meanwhile, neuroscience is split into its branches in a different way. The goal of a neuroscientist might be to explore behaviour in one area of psychology (e.g., cognitive psych), but the type of neuroscientist they are depends on how far they are willing to decompose the brain (See Fig. 3). Interested in general regions of the brain? You might like cognitive and behavioural neuroscience. Want to go deeper and look at how neuron activity correlates with that of neural systems? We have computational neuroscience for you! And if you'd like to explore the biological properties of the neuron, molecular neuroscience might just be your cup of tea. And because the branches of neuroscience study different levels of organisation of the brain, they require substantially different imaging tools and techniques that vary in terms of spatial and temporal resolution.

Fig. 3 Levels of organisation and explanation of the brain (adapted from Shepherd, 1994)

The space of cognitive science

The distinction between neuroscience and psychology gives us a way of understanding how we go about doing cognitive science. According to Bermúdez, there are 3 dimensions of variation along which one can choose to study cognitive science. These include:

• Organisation --> At what level of organisation are you studying cognition? What is your unit of analysis? Are you looking at the behavioural scale, like in psychology? Or are you interested in regions and subcomponents of the brain, like in the various branches of neuroscience?
• Tools and techniques --> Given your chosen unit of analysis, what are the appropriate measurement and analytical tools for your study? Is temporal resolution important? Can spatial resolution be neglected?
• Functions and capacities --> What kinds of processes and abilities are you trying to study? Memory? Learning? Forgetting?

Given the three dimensions above, we can sketch a 3-dimensional space that, according to Bermúdez, better represents contemporary cognitive science (See Fig. 4). The goal of cognitive science is then to integrate the entire space below and provide a holistic account of cognition.

Fig 4. The space of contemporary cognitive science (Bermúdez, 2023)

Some thoughts

This was a very accessible introduction to cognitive science and its concerns. Given my previous experience taking a cogsci module, it served as a good reminder of the components and goals of the field. That being said, I do have a few thoughts to reflect upon. Though not (yet) explicitly stated, it is clear that the author (alongside many researchers in this area) takes an information-processing, representational account of the mind and cognition. Is this the only way? Ecological psychology is clearly a proof of concept that it does not have to be the case, and there are also other 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) approaches that reject the existence of mental representations that allegedly play a causal role in cognitive and sensory capacities.

Additionally, it's important to note that the space described above only accounts for neuroscience and psychology. What about the rest of the core disciplines? How do they contribute to this space? My guess is that the actual space might have even higher dimensions, adding more variation, and perhaps explaining why it's so difficult to study cognitive science. Might this suggest that cognitive science is not well-constrained, and that achieving unity among the disciplines is nothing but a pipedream? Bermudez seems to think otherwise. But for now, we move on to exploring the historical development of cognitive science, which will be covered in the next section of the book.

References

Bermúdez, J. L. (2023). Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Gardner, H. E. (1985). The mind’s new science: A History Of The Cognitive Revolution. Basic Books.

Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 141–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00029-9

Shepherd, G. (1994). Neurobiology (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.