Cognitive science
Last update: 15 Feb 2026 11:09First version: 16 August 1995
- Not to be confused with any of the following, unless it is in the end
identical to one or more of them:
- Analogy and Metaphor
- Artificial Intelligence
- Noam Chomsky
- Collective Cognition
- Cybernetics
- Dynamics in Cognitive Science
- Emotion
- Evolutionary Psychology
- Linguistics
- Machine Learning, Statistical Inference and Induction
- Neural Nets and Connectionism
- Neuropsychology
- Neuroscience
- Philosophy of Mind
- "Pre-Cognitivism"
- Scientific Thinking
- Herbert Simon
- Social Neuroscience
- Thought and Society
- L. S. Vygotsky
- Recommended, big picture:
- Philip N. Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind
- Justin Leiber, Invitation to Cognitive Science
- Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things
- Stephen Pinker
- The Language Instinct [or, Chomsky Without Tears]
- How the Mind Works
- Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
- Recommended, medium zoom:
- Denise D. Cummins, The Other Side of Psychology: How Experimental Psychologists Find Out About the Way We Think and Act [Of course, cognitive science is more than just cognitive psychology, and experimental psychology is more than just cognitive psychology.]
- David Danks, Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models
- Gary F. Marcus, The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science
- Tim Shallice, From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure
- Tim Shallice and Richard P. Cooper, The Organisation of Mind
- Sara J. Shettleworth, Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior
- Recommended, close-ups:
- Stanislas Dehane, The Number Sense
- Daniel Dennett writes, among other things, extensively about the philosophical implications of cognitive science, in the process explaining a lot of it, and defending the general approach of orthodox cognitivists.
- Reuven Dukas (ed.), Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making
- Frederick Eberhardt and David Danks, "Confirmation in the Cognitive Sciences: The Problematic Case of Bayesian Models", Minds and Machines 21 (2011): 389--410, phil-sci/8778 [Comments]
- K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance", Psychological Review 100 (1993): 363--406
- Marcello Frixione, "Tractable Competence", Minds and Machines 11 (2001): 379--397 [Cognitive systems do not, in fact, routinely solve intractable problems, so theories which postulate that they do are bad. Calling them "competence" theories is no excuse.]
- Ronald N. Giere, Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach
- Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality; The Adaptive Toolbox
- Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
- Alison Gopnik, "Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 375 (2020): 20190502
- Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn
- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild [Actually, I have mixed feelings about the book, but I am, if I may say so, very fond of my review of it: Naval Collective Intelligence.]
- Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution [Review by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy in American Scientist; my review: The Object-Oriented Turn in Generative Grammar]
- G. E. R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind
- A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations [Comments]
- Gary F. Marcus and Ernest Davis, "How Robust Are Probabilistic Models of Higher-Level Cognition?", Psychological Science 24 (2013): 2351--2360
- Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason
- Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason [especially the chapters "Waiting for the Messiah" and "The Man Who Mistook His Brain for His Mind."]
- Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Cognition and Communication
- Alonso H. Vera and Herbert A. Simon, "Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation," Cognitive Science 17 (1993): 7--48
- Rhiannon Weaver, "Parameters, Predictions, and Evidence in Computational Modeling: A Statistical View Informed by ACT-R", Cognitive Science 32 (2008): 1349--1375 [A really great paper on using modern statistical methods to connect sophisticated cognitive models to data. I am very proud that Weaver is from the CMU stats. department, though she's not my student.]
- Wilson and Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
- Xiaojin Zhu, Timothy T. Rogers and Bryan R. Gibson, "Human Rademacher Complexity", in Advances in Neural Information Processing, vol. 22 (NIPS 2009) [my commentary]
- Recommended, historical interest:
- Noam Chomsky, "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior," Language 35 (1959): 26--58 [online]
- Kenneth Craik, The Nature of Explanation
- George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribam, Plans and the Structure of Behavior
- To read, history and philosophy:
- William Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience
- Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science
- Roy D'Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science
- Howard Gardener, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution [I will finish one of these decades]
- Jakob Hohwy, The Predictive Mind
- Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages
- To read:
- Marcus P. Adams, "Explaining the Theory of Mind Deficit in Autism Spectrum Disorder", phil-sci/8781
- John R. Anderson, Mark V. Albert and Jon M. Fincham, "Tracing Problem Solving in Real Time: fMRI Analysis of the Subject-paced Tower of Hanoi", Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 (2005): 1261--1274
- H. Clark Barrett, "On the functional origins of essentialism"
- H. Clark Barrett and Tanya Behne, "Understanding death as the cessation of intentional action: A cross-cultural developmental study"
- Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts
- Karen A. Cerulo, Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong
- Sun-Ki Chai, Choosing an Identity: A General Model of Preference and Belief Formation
- Clancy, Situated Cognition
- Axel Cleeremans, Mechanisms of Implicit Learning: Connectionist Models of Sequence Processing
- Beth Crandall, Gary Klein and Robert R. Hoffman, Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis
- David Danks, "Rational Analyses, Instrumentalism, and Implementations", in Chater and Oaksford (eds.) The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Rational Models of Cognition [PDF preprint]
- Judy S. DeLoache, "Becoming symbol-minded", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 66--70
- Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Cognition and Culture [Precis as a BBS target article]
- Guy Dove, Abstract Concepts and the Embodied Mind: Rethinking Grounded Cognition
- Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding
- W. K. Estes, Classification and Cognition
- Jeff Evans, Adults' Mathematical Thinking and Emotions: A Study of Numerate Practices
- Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, "In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003): 454--459. Brought to my notice by reading an interesting comment by Frederick Toates, TiCS 8 (2004): 57 (link), pointing out that much of what Evans believes to be uniquely human has parallels in other animals, suggesting that the dual-systems design has older evolutionary roots.]
- Klaus Fiedler and Peter Juslin (eds.), Information Sampling and Adaptive Cognition
- Peter Gärdenfors, Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought
- Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Mind's Past
- Janice Glasgow, N. Hari Narayanan and B. Chandrasekaran (eds.), Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computational Perspectives [Foreword by Herbert Simon]
- Vinod Goel, Sketches of Thought
- Alison Gopnik and Andrew N. Meltzoff, Words, Thoughts, and Theories
- James Grange and George Houghton (eds.), Task Switching and Cognitive Control
- R. L. Gregory, Mind in Science
- Griffin, Animal Minds
- Stephen Jose Hanson, Malcolm Bauer, "Machine Learning, Clustering, and Polymorphy", arxiv:1304.3432 [Also UAI 1985]
- Paul L. Harris, Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others
- Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence
- Ray Jackendoff
- Consciousness and the Computational Mind
- Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure
- Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation
- Patterns in the Mind
- A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning
- Philip N. Johnson-Laird
- How We Reason
- Human and Machine Thinking
- Mental Models
- "Deductive Reasoning," Annual Review of Psychology 50 (1999): 109--35
- Bela Julesz, Dialogues on Perception
- Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science
- Frank C. Keil and Robert A. Wilson (eds.), Explanation and Cognition
- Charles M. Keller and Janet Dixon Keller, Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work
- Michael D. Kirchhoff, The Idealized Mind: From Model-Based Science to Cognitive Science
- Eliza Kosoy, David M. Chan, Adrian Liu, Jasmine Collins, Bryanna Kaufmann, Sandy Han Huang, Jessica B. Hamrick, John Canny, Nan Rosemary Ke, Alison Gopnik, "Towards Understanding How Machines Can Learn Causal Overhypotheses", arxiv:2206.08353
- Franco Landriscina, Simulation and Learning: A Model-Centered Approach
- Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life
- Howard N. Margolis, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment
- Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds.), The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts
- Arthur B. Markman, Knowledge Representation
- Manolo Martinez, "Representations Are Rate-Distortion Sweet Spots", Philosophy of Science 86 (2019): 1214--1226
- David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought
- Dimitri Coelho Mollo and Alfredo Vernazzani, "The Formats of Cognitive Representation: A Computational Account", Philosophy of Science 91 (2024): 682--701
- Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts
- Nancy Nersessian, Creating Scientific Concepts
- Albert Newen, Andreas Bartels, and Eva-Maria Jung (eds.), Knowledge and Representation
- Mary C. Olmstead and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Comparative Cognition
- Rolf Pfeifer and Josh C. Bongard, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence
- Rolf Pfeifer and Christian Scheier, Understanding Intelligence
- Steven Phillips, "Systematic Minds, Unsystematic Models: Learning Transfer in Humans and Networks", Minds and Machines 9 (1999): 383--398
- Jan L. Plass, Roxana Moreno and Roland Brünken (eds.), Cognitive Load Theory
- Thad A. Polk and Colleen M. Seifert (eds.), Cognitive Modeling
- John Pollock, Cognitive Carpentry: A Blueprint for How to Build a Person
- Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science
- Daniel Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works
- Rajkumar Vasudeva Raju, J. Swaroop Guntupalli, Guangyao Zhou, Carter Wendelken, Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla, and Dileep George, "Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus", Science Advances 10:31 (2024)
- Frederick Reif, Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains
- Zhanna Reznikova, Animal Intelligence: From Individual to Social Cognition
- Don Ross, Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation
- Timo J. Septer, Jacob Dijkstra and Frans N. Stokman, "Detecting and measuring crucial differences between cognitive maps", Rationality and Society 24 (2012): 383--407
- Reza Shadmehr and Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi, Biological Learning and Control: How the Brain Builds Representations, Predicts Events, and Makes Decisions
- Atsushi Shimojima, Semantic Properties of Diagrams and Their Cognitive Potentials
- Robert W. Shumaker, Kristina R. Walkup, and Benjamin B. Beck, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals
- M. Sigman, G. A. Cecchi, C. D. Gilbert and M. O. Magnasco, "On a common circle: natural scenes and Gestalt rules," cond-mat/0105097
- Daniel L. Silver, Tom M. Mitchell, "The Roles of Symbols in Neural-based AI: They are Not What You Think!", arxiv:2304.13626
- Speaking Minds [Interviews with cognitivists]
- Dan Sperber (ed.), Metarepresentations
- Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen, Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science
- Catherine E. Stinson, Cognitive Mechanisms and Computational Models: Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience [Ph.D. Thesis, Philosophy Dept., University of Pittsburgh, 2013; thanks to Dr. Stinson for a copy]
- Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction
- Tan Zhi-Xuan, Nishad Gothoskar, Falk Pollok, Dan Gutfreund, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Vikash K. Mansinghka, "Solving the Baby Intuitions Benchmark with a Hierarchically Bayesian Theory of Mind", arxiv:2208.02914
- Paul Thagard
- Kurt VanLehn, Mind Bugs: The Origins of Procedural Misconceptions
- Iris van Rooij, Olivia Guest, Federico G. Adolfi, Ronald de Haan, Antonina Kolokolova and Patricia Rich, "Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science", psyarxiv/4cbuv (2023) [Superificial and no doubt unfair comments: This is the latest in a series of papers from van Rooij and collaborators, applying computational complexity theory to questions in cognitive science, broadly conceived. This seems to me a very worth-while undertaking, and I have no particular reason to think any of their theorems are wrong. But I am uneasy about the general trend of the papers, because they seem to prove too much, viz., that science in general is computationally infeasible --- since my superficial impression is that there isn't really much in their math that would pick out cognition as harder than, say, geology. One reason for bookmarking this paper, and planning to read it very carefully, is to come to grips with these doubts.]
- Jonathan A. Waskan
- "Intrinsic Cognitive Models," Cognitive Science 27 (2003): 259--283
- Models and Cognition [this sound an awful lot like Kenneth Craik's classic, The Nature of Explanation --- not that that's a bad thing.]
- Philip David Zelazo, "The development of conscious control in childhood", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 12--17