CSE 485:

History of Cognitive
Science

raju.bapi<AT>iiit.ac.in
Outline
◼ The beginnings
◼ Important Theories and Personalities
Cognitive Science
An interdisciplinary endeavour
Neuroscience Cognitive Psychology
(Medicine)

Linguistics Philosophy

Education, Computation
Creative Arts (AI, Physics
Maths, Stats,
Engg)
Anthropology Economics, Management
 Historical Background
◼ Cognitive Science has a very long past but
a relatively short history! (Gardner, 1985)

◼ Rooted in the history of philosophy

• Rationalism (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz,...)

vs.
Empiricism (Aristotle, James, Locke, Hume, Mill, ...)

• Arithmetic and logic (Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, Peano,

Frege, Russell, Gödel...)
Plato

William
James
The Cognitive Revolution
 Bruner’s Studies in the “New
Look” in Perception made the
subject an active participant
rather than merely a passive
receiver of external stimuli.

His later studies of Thinking

and the process of
Categorization helped lay the
groundwork for Cognitive
Science.
Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
 George A. Miller (1920-2012)
Magical Number 7±2 (Capacity of Short Term memory)
 Leon Festinger (1919-1989)
Social Psychology Provided an alternative to Behaviorism.
Dissonance Theory provided a Cognitive Alternative.
 A Watershed Moment!
Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (2014)
John O’Keefe, May-Britt, and Edvard Moser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfNVv0
A8QvI&ab_channel=mwlmovies
Hippocampal place cells recorded in the
Wilson lab at MIT (2010 video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYCR0p
QLd_U&ab_channel=NTNU
A Journey Into Entorhinal Cortex | Edvard
and May-Britt Moser | NTNU (2011)
AI, NLP, CogSci

qualities
 Alan Turing was a British
Mathematician who made
important contributions
to computability theory
before turning his
attention to Biology and
Artificial Intelligence.

Movie: The Imitation Game (2014)

(Benedict Cummerbatch as Alan Turing)
way for general
Purpose computer
psychology.
by the next stage to identify objects in the
visual field
With the birth of artificial intelligence and robotics,
ancient dream of mechanizing mind became more
possible.
It has turned out that much can be learned by
identifying and solving the engineering problems
involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9p8B7-5MTI&ab_channel=MITCSAIL
PDP foundation for Deep Learning Revolution
Language: Nature vs Nurture Debate

Noam Chomsky (1928-)

Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Innateness (1938-2018)

Jeff Elman
(1948-2018)

Rethinking Innateness
 Anything Missing?

Philosophy of Mind:
The Consciousness Debate!
John Searle (1932-)
Lucia Melloni, Liad Mudrik, Michael Pitts, Christof Koch (2021). Making the hard problem of consciousness
easier. Science 28 May 2021: Vol. 372, Issue 6545, pp. 911-912
Understanding Computation
Building computer models that
learn from the environment

Computer Science/ To understand how

Artificial Intelligence the brain works

Neuroscience
Interdisciplinary
study of intelligent
behavior
To understand Cognitive For behavioral data in
limits of theories Science various tasks; mental
representations and
Philosophy processes

Cognitive Psychology
To understand
Linguistics
structure of
language
Summary
◼ History of CogSci linked to developments in
◼ Philosophy
◼ Cognitive Psychology
◼ Linguistics
◼ Neuroscience
◼ Cognitive Modeling (Connectionism)
◼ AI and Robotics
References
◼ Gerhard Strube, IIG, Univ. Freiburg: CogSci
Lectures at Summer School, Sofia (2003).
◼ Slides from Susse, Dept of Philosophy,
Michigan State University.
◼ History of CogSci Slides from Jeff Moher,
Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University
◼ Paul Thagard (2005). Mind: An Introduction to
Cognitive Science. 2nd Edition. MIT Press.