Cognitive science: An introduction, N. A. Stillings, M. H. Feinstein, J. L. Garfield, E. L. Rissland, D. A. Rosenbaum, S. E. Weisler and L. Baker-Ward, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987 No. of pages: 553. ISBN 0-262-19257-8, Price £22.50
✍ Scribed by Tim Valentine
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 193 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The authors' aim in writing this book is to provide an introductory text for students of cognitive science. As such it is primarily intended as a course text for undergraduate students. The layout incorporates a number of features which would be helpful in using the book for teaching. It starts with a comprehensive set of notes for the teacher which give an outline of the contents of each chapter and recommends where omissions could be made, and which chapters should be considered prerequisites for others. Each chapter ends with a paragraph making useful suggestions for further reading.
The authors see cognitive science as composed of five disciplines. After an introductory chapter in which the notion of a cognitive science is introduced, and its interdisciplinary nature stressed, each of the disciplines is discussed in turn. There are two chapters on each of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence and one chapter on each of linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy. The remaining four chapters cover applications of cognitive science, focusing on topics which the authors feel would benefit from a more interdisciplinary approach. These chapters cover language acquisition, semantics, natural language understanding and vision.
This organization of the book can tend to make some topics appear rather fragmented. However, devoting at least one chapter to the approach of each discipline has the advantage that these each of chapters could be used in its own right as introductory reviews of these disciplines. The chapters on linguistics and philosophy, in particular, provide very interesting introductions. To some extent a unifying theme is provided by discussion of the implications for cognitive science in ech of the chapters devoted to a particular discipline. However, in some chapters this discussion is rather brief and seems somewhat tenuously related to the main subject-matter of the chapter.
Chapter 1 introduces an information-processing approach to the study of the mind, making the point that the functional aspects of an information-processing system can be studied independently of its physical realization.
The first of the two cognitive psychology chapters introduces the idea of a cognitive architecture and its influence on the ways in which knowledge may be represented. It then reviews work on the representation of knowledge, discussing propositional representation, schematic representation including scripts, and mental imagery. Finally, control processes are considered; in particular the processes involved in skill acquisition. The second chapter on cognitive psychology applies the theory of a cognitive architecture to some selected topics, these being concepts and categories, memory, reasoning and problem-solving and cognitive development.
Artificial intelligence is also covered in two chapters. The approach in these is to place emphasis on illustrating various techniques by describing individual A1 programs in some detail. The first chapter is dedicated to knowledge representation and illustrates the implementation of semantic nets, frames, scripts, production systems and formal logic in A1 programs. The second A1 chapter covers algorithms for searching a problem space and learning in A1 programs. The style of these chapters on A1 makes them rather difficult to follow. Although the extensive use of examples of programs is sometimes helpful, at times the main subject-matter can get rather lost. For example, a program that learns to integrate symbolic mathematical expressions is used to illustrate learning by example. The choice of a less esoteric domain would have helped.
The linguistics chapter provides an interesting introduction. It is divided into two sections, one covering phonology, the other on syntax. The neuroscience chapter is a fairly standard introduction to neuropsychology and is clearly written. The chapter on philosophy completes the reviews of the individual disciplines. It provides an excellent contribution and is really the only section of the book where some of the assumptions of cognitive science are seriously challenged. It includes an excellent historical account of the emergence of cognitive science which I felt should have formed part of the introductory chapter. The remainder of the chapter covers functionalism, propositional attitudes, qualia and knowledge representation.
It seems rather surprising that, of four chapters on the 'applications' of cognitive science,