Cognitive Sciences at the Leading Edge

This new book focuses on new research on cognitive science which is most simply defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence. It is an interdisciplinary study drawing from relevant fields including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, biology, and physics. There are several approaches to the study of cognitive science. These approaches may be classified broadly as symbolic, connectionist, and dynamic systems. Symbolic -- holds that cognition can be explained using operations on symbols, by means of explicit computational theories and models of mental (but not brain) processes analogous to the workings of a digital computer. Connectionist (subsymbolic) -- holds that cognition can only be modelled and explained by using artificial neural networks on the level of physical brain properties. Hybrid systems -- holds that cognition is best modelled using both connectionist and symbolic models, and possibly other computational techniques.