Cognition and Technologies

Cognition and Technologies Super module



Cognition and Technologies Super module

Introduction and Context

Cognitive science is a rapidly emerging multidisciplinary field that uses converging approaches and technologies to understand behavior, brain, and mind. Some disciplines that comprise this area, such as philosophy and psychology, have been pondering issues of mind and behavior throughout the history of intellectual thought and scientific study. A cognitive revolution was forged in the 1950s and 1960s spurred on by a variety of influences, including rapid developments in computation, linguistic and psychological concepts and formalism, discoveries in neuroscience and medicine, as well as the development of key tools and technologies. Curiosity and intellectual leadership helped to stir this volatile mixture, resulting in an explosion in interest and inquiry reflected in developments during recent decades.

The subject matter of cognitive science has much to tell us about aspects of leadership, including how we make decisions, how we learn about our world and get information from our surroundings and interactions with others, how our biological and evolutionary heritages constrain our knowledge, how we communicate with each other, how society and culture shape our minds, and how we can take advantage of technology to enhance our performance. The complex nature of such a diverse interdisciplinary enterprise and the role played by some of its intellectual leaders in shaping the discipline also has much to tell us about leadership. However, before exploring these considerations and others, it is important to provide a sense of what this very broad area of inquiry is all about and recall a bit of its history.

It is customary to date the birth of cognitive science in 1956. Indeed, this year sees to organize the first conference devoted to artificial intelligence and its application to psychology, involving computer scientists Allen Newell, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, the mathematician Claude Shannon, the economist and psychologist Herbert Simon, the linguist Noam Chomsky, the psychologist George Miller and John Swets neurobiologists David Hubble and Torsten Wiesel. The year 1956 is also rich in basic publications in the field of cognitive science. A few years earlier, however, the Macy Conferences held in New York by the eponymous foundation from 1942 had collected mathematicians John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon , the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in order to create a general science of the functioning of the mind . In addition, just after the Second World War, research which was not identified as the artificial intelligence enjoyed significant support from the army, including the DARPA U.S. (Chemero 2009, 23 - 65).

Literature Review

Consider an average day in your life, and you can get some sense of the incredible scope of behavioural and mental activity that comprise just a portion of what often seems normal and routine to you. Yet the simple things that we do, going to the kitchen to make morning coffee; getting to work; dealing with family, friends, co-workers, and others; reading e-mail; watching a video; worrying about money; and so on, ...