The cognitive sciences are a whole of scientific disciplines aiming to the study and the comprehension of the mechanisms of the human Pensée, Animal E or artificial, and more generally of any system Cognitif, i.e. all system complexes treatment of the Information able to acquire, to preserve, and to transmit Connaissance S. cognitive sciences thus rest on the study and the modeling of phenomena as various as the Perception, the Intelligence, the Langage, the Calcul, the Raisonnement or even the conscience… As an interdisciplinary field, cognitive sciences jointly use data resulting from a multitude of branches from the Science and Ingénierie, in particular: the Linguistic , the Anthropology, the Psychology, the Neurosciences, the Philosophy, the Artificial intelligence.

After approximately fifty years of existence, cognitive sciences thus form a very vast interdisciplinary field of which the limits and the articulation of the disciplines constitutive between them always make debate. Some estimate however that cognitive sciences exceeded the simple stage of a multi-field accumulation of knowledge and gave rise to two autonomous disciplines:

• with a science fundamental, known as Science of the cognition, in which the specialists sometimes called knowledge engineers are brought together in learned societies and publish in international scientific magazines transdisciplinaires.
• with an industrial applicatif sector of the field of the engineering of knowledge: the Cognitique.

In France where the disciplinary tradition is strong, were born as of the years 1990 from the expansion from Cognitive Sciences from the debates on the real effectiveness from the interdisciplinarity in the scientific research. That in particular owing to the fact that to include many approaches can make more complicated their apprehension. However of many regroupings of researchers and young learned societies attempt to develop the relevance and the range of the interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Sciences. Are within this framework in particular Association for Cognitive Research (ARCO), and the French federation of the Students and Young Enquiring in Sciences Cognitives (Fresco).

History of cognitive sciences

It is of use to date the birth from cognitive sciences of 1956. Indeed, this year sees to organize the very first conference devoted to the Artificial intelligence and its application to the Psychologie, in which takes part the data processing specialists Allen Newell, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, the mathematician Claude Shannon, the economist and psychological Herbert Simon, the linguist Noam Chomsky, the psychologists George Miller and John Swets the neurobiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. The year 1956 is also rich in fundamental publications for the field of cognitive sciences.

A few years before with New York, the Conferences Macy organized by the Foundation Macy starting from 1942, but especially between 1946 and 1953 had gathered the mathematicians John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson with an aim of creating a general science of the operation of the Esprit.

Disciplines

Cognitive linguistics and generative grammar

detailed Articles: Linguistic cognitive, Generative grammar

The Linguistic formal and more particularly work of Noam Chomsky had a decisive influence at the time of the emergence of cognitive sciences at the end of the Années 1950. Chomsky in particular protested against the design of the language like a whole of “practices” learned by observation and Conditionnement with the profit from the idea from a grammar made up of rules described formally. Asserting Poverty of the stimulus, Chomsky considers that this competence is the result of the innate Connaissance of a universal Grammaire. These ideas were developed apart from the Linguistique by a pupil of Chomsky, the philosopher Jerry Fodor, in its famous theses on the Modularité of the spirit and the Mentalais.

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Analytical philosophy and philosophy of the spirit

detailed Articles: analytical Philosophy, Philosophy of the spirit

Frege revolutionizes traditional logic by introducing the concept of denotation into its article Sens and Dénotation (Sinn und Bedeutung). The star direction “of the morning” (A) is different from that of “evening star” (b) since their acoustic or signitives achievements differ: “The difference in direction corresponds to a difference of the mode of donation of the indicated object” nevertheless they indicate same reality: the Venus planet from where (A) = (b) has a value of knowledge because they are not the every day that it is discovered that a star is a planet. Thus cit. “the denotation of “evening star” and “star of the morning” would be the same one, but their direction would be different”. What made it possible to bring up to date the sign of Saussure which refused to allot the reference to the world to it. It introduced the quantification into formal logic. The universal quantifier is opposed: “All the men are mortals” with the existential quantifier “He exists at least a mortal man”. He founded the Calcul of the predicates.

Artificial intelligence

detailed Article: Artificial intelligence.

Neurosciences

detailed Article: Neurosciences

Cognitive psychology

detailed Articles: cognitive Psychology, Cognition

The cognitive Psychologie relates to the development processes and of use of the Connaissance S at the human being. Although one can find many precursors like Hermann Ebbinghaus, Jean Piaget or Frederick Bartlett, it appears truly only at the end of the Années 1950. It is characterized by a return of the “intermediate variables” between the Stimulus and the answer, banished by the Béhaviorisme, and the use of new methods to try to observe these variables by avoiding the problems encountered by the Introspection at the beginning of the 20th century.

Currents and concepts

Cognitivism

detailed Articles: Cognitivisme, computo-représentationnelle Approach of the spirit

The cognitivism is one of the two principal currents of cognitive sciences which it dominated to the rise to power of the connexionnism. It is founded on the idea that the Esprit is a processing machine symbolic system of information (metaphor of the computer), i.e. it rather operates on representations according to their syntactic properties than of their significance. Inspired by the results of Turing, of many researchers moreover admitted that this type of treatments could be carried out by machines completely different from the physical point of view and thus that simulation and data-processing modeling could provide new means of studying the operation of the Esprit joining thus the project of the Cybernétique to integrate within the same theoretical framework the study of the natural and artificial systems.

Networks of neurons and connexionnism

detailed Article: Connexionnisme

Resulting from the Cybernetic , the connexionnism belongs to cognitive sciences since the origin. After an eclipse during the years 1970, it regains today in importance with progress of the cerebral Imagerie and the neurosciences. Sharing with the cognitivism the idea of representation, it rejects on the other hand the assumption of a cognitive operation symbolic system. From the point of view connexionnist, cognition is the product of a parallel calculation operated by entities sub-symbolic systems (formal Neuron or not) and the significance rises from the state of the network formed by these entities at a given time.

The directed Graphes of the perceptron are balanced by values of entry called weight. There will be answer if the sum of the entries multiplied by the weights reaches a minimal threshold of activation (when there is an answer, one calls it PPSE, if not PPSI, E for excitation and I for inhibition ). Until the end of the Sixties much of authors compared them a little quickly to truths neurons because of their round form with a tail and owing to the fact that the authors who invented it (Selfridge, Lettvin…) the terminology presented in Synapse and synaptic transmission began again completely.

These Automate S is often called Neuron S formal. (cf formal Neuron)

The term is not so abusive besides, because the article founder of J.Y. Lettvin, H.R. Maturana, W.S. McCulloch and W.H. Pitts, What the frog' S eye such the frog' S brain, , Proc. ANGER 47 (1959) 1940--1951, included in Embodiments off Mind of Warren S. McCulloch (MIT Near, 1965) mention a completely comparable operation of the neurons of the Rétine in the clamping plate; it should nevertheless be remembered permanently that it is only a convenient Métaphore which is just used to help the reflection. The term of networks neuromimetic is sometimes preferred.

• the article founder (pdf, English, 11 pages)

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Cognitive processes

detailed Articles: Cognition, cognitive Processes

Caution

detailed Article: Attention

The attention is roughly speaking the capacity to be concentrated on certain stimuli or on the contrary impossibility of treating more than one certain quantity of information with a given moment.

Memory

detailed Article: Memory

The memory makes it possible to retain information to re-use them later on. Contrary to the Training behaviorist, the concept of memory insists on the intermediate structures and processes between acquisition of this information and their consequences on the behavior.

It is the subject of many work in cognitive sciences, as well from the point of view of psychology or the neurosciences as modeling. The researchers thus endeavoured to highlight the various structures composing the memory while basing themselves at the same time on experiments and the dysfunctions observed among cérébro-injured patients.

Appeared in the years 1960, the modal model of the memory was one of most influential. It distinguishes the sensory Registre (great quantity of information in visual form during a few milliseconds), the short-term Mémoire (number limited of elements in verbal form during a few seconds) and the long-term Mémoire (semantic information, in practice unbounded of duration or capacity).

The concept of Working memory was presented by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. This model and others more recent as that of Cowan highlight the bonds between attention and memory. The working memory has thus as a role not only to contain information coming from the sensory systems but also of the information extracted the long-term memory to be used by the processes of Raisonnement and decision making.

In the field of the long-term memory, several distinctions were proposed like those between episodical Mémoire (autobiographical) and declaratory Mémoire (general knowledge) by Endel Tulving, between semantic Mémoire and procedural Mémoire (gestures, behaviors, know-how) by John Anderson and between Mémoire clarifies (used in a conscious and controlled way) and implicit Mémoire (automatic). Many research also carries on the mental representations which organize this information.

On their side, the neurosciences also sought to identify the cerebral structures fulfilling these various functions and to describe the biological processes allowing the training and the encoding of information. The phenomenon of long-term Potentialization explains in particular how the repeated stimulation of certain neuronal connections makes them more suitable for be activated in the future in answer to a similar stimulus (even partially).

Lastly, of many work concern the processes of encoding, of storage and recovery. Among the principal results one can quote the Courbe of the lapse of memory of Ebbinghaus, the concepts of Effet of récence and primacy or the Amorçage. Lastly, several experiments underline the role of the memory in the expertise (thus the good players of failures do not differ from the beginners by their speed of treatment but by the organization of information on the play).

To also note that a certain number of models of the memory known as " with traces" tend to develop in the line line of the running connexionnist. They are deeply dynamic theories seeking to explain the designs modularists like emergent of a system complexes and not partitioned which would store all the information in the forms of traces. These traces would not be inevitably localized on the cerebral level but distributed and would be defined by a great whole of factors Sémantique S, emotional, driving, etc

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