What is Cognitive Science?

Throughout the past four years, I've been asked about this question a hundred times, if not more. My friends and colleagues just assume I studied computer science, which is a fair guess, as I did study C.S.. Instead of spending 10 minutes explaining my program whenever I meet someone new, I decide to write it down so that next time I can send them the link in 10 seconds.

How do experts define Cog Sci?

Wikipedia

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes.It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). ..The fundamental concept of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

McGill

Cognitive Science is the interdisciplinary study of cognition in humans, animals, and machines. It encompasses the traditional disciplines of psychology, computer science, neuroscience, linguistics and philosophy. The goal of cognitive science is to understand the principles of intelligence with the hope that this will lead to better comprehension of the mind and of learning and to develop intelligent devices.

How do I understand Cog Sci?

How did I know Cog Sci?

I initially chose to study cognitive science because I was bad at taking choices. I couldn't decide if I liked arts or science more, so I applied to Bachelor of Arts and Science. I found it hard picking a single arts program and another science program out of hundreds of programs, so I picked cog sci, one of the three only interdisciplinary programs that alone satisfied my graduation requirements. I was especially attracted by the term "Artificial Intelligence" on the program description page. "Sounds like I can do Siri in the future", that was the first thing popped up to my mind 4 years ago. At that time I had no idea about machine learning, neural network, or NLP, the only AI application I knew was Siri. Coincidentally, I was on the right track at the very beginning, as today I'm in fact working for the company that used to power Siri.

Why do I love Cog Sci?

From my point of view, cognitive science in general studies 2 topics:

  1. How do we humans process knowledge?
  2. How can we make machines process knowledge like humans?

My interest is more in the latter, and my focus of knowledge is human language in particular. Linguists study how human languages are logically structured, how they convey meaning both shallowly and deeply; computer scientists study how to translate human languages into machine code, and how to implement algorithm ideas; psychologists and neuroscientist study how our brain perceive languages, and how they are processed in different stages. However, none of the aforementioned scientists, without knowledge in each others' disciplines, could alone make machines understand human languages. That's why collaboration is needed, and with collaboration, the field of cognitive science was born.

What courses did I take (and enjoyed)?

I took a variety of courses from 5 different departments, computer science, mathematics, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Surprisingly, I found most of the courses, despite of having different department codes, internally connected. For example, I have learned First-Order Logic more than 4 times in different comp sci,linguistics, philosophy, and math courses, and I also encountered Lsambda calculus in both comp sci and linguistics classes, not to mention how many times I have seen the term p-value. Below is a list of courses I enjoyed the most: