Abstract

FIERRO, Marco. The Conceptual Development of Cognitive Science. Part I. rev.colomb.psiquiatr. [online]. 2011, vol.40, n.3, pp.519-533. ISSN 0034-7450.

Introduction: Cognitive science has become the most influential mental paradigm of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Its concepts and approach to problems and solutions have changed significantly in the course of a few years. Method: The fundamental concepts of cognitive science are presented and discussed, divided into four stages: The beginnings, classical cognitivism, connectionism, and embodiment-enaction. Development and Conclusion: The beginnings are marked by the construction of modern computers and the advent of information theory. Classical cognitivism began in 1956 with the notion that all information processing systems, including the human brain, share the same principles. From the analogy between computer and brain, it was considered appropriate to study the mind as if it were software. Connectionism, also called parallel distributed processing or neural networks get these names because of their underlying computational architecture. It helps explain the speed with which cognitive processes are performed and resistance to damage, being closer to biology. It does not work with representations, but with patterns of activation and deactivation of the component units and transmission of signals between them. Typical cases of tasks performed by neural networks are found in perception and memory, for example, pattern recognition (faces, words from letters, etc).

Keywords : Cognitive science; cognition; computation; connectionism; cognitivism; representation.

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