INTRODUCTION

We began our study of the science of the mind by looking at how the new discipline of Cognitive Science was established. Part I considered some of the key studies that helped to establish cognitive science as a field, and looked at how cognitive scientists moved away from some of the assumptions behind these initial studies (that we can study the mind without studying the brain, for example). We investigated the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science and introduced a theme that was one of the guiding ideas in this new discipline and throughout the book – that cognition is a form of information processing.

Part II reinforced this theme by examining the integration challenge, and proposed thinking about this challenge in terms of different mental architectures. A mental architecture is a way of thinking about the overall organization of the mind in terms of different cognitive systems, together with a model of how information is processed within and across these systems. In Part III we explored different models of information processing, focusing on both the computer-inspired physical symbol hypothesis and the neurally inspired artificial neural networks approach.

In Part IV we learned about the concept of modularity, the idea that many information-processing tasks are carried out by specialized sub-systems (modules). We investigated the range of different techniques and technologies used to study the organization of the mind, and used the cognitive science of mindreading (our ability to interpret and make sense of other people's behavior) as a case study of how some of the ideas about modularity have been put into practice.