Publisher's Synopsis
Cognitive science mainly includes the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind, including approaches from a wide variety of fields which can be broadly classified as follows:
Philosophical perspective: It is one of the oldest disciplines under cognitive science related with a way of thinking about something based on experiments or reasoning. Reasoning involves reaching the fact based on the rules of logic or drawing a conclusion based on similarities among the many observations.
Psychological perspective: It deals with the study of mental phenomena to understand both mind and behaviour.
Neuroscience perspective: It includes studying brain anatomy and relating it with the cognitive processes in terms of underlying brain mechanisms.
Linguistics perspective: It concern with the ability of the brain to understand the complex process related to language.
Artificial intelligence perspective: It is toward developing approaches that can mimic the human brain. These developments lead to such programs, which can even perform complex operations.
Human memory can be considered as the human brain's capacity to encode, store and recall the most relevant and valuable information out of a continuous stream of sensory perceptions, and experiences derived by interaction with the outside world with a view to use this stored information for analysis of future events and for acquisition of skills based on work and experiences. Human memory may be classified mainly into two broad categories:
i) Short-term memory: This refers to the working memory, dealing with storage and recall of information over a relatively short period of time. Working memory is considered to have only a limited capacity, allowing temporary storage of the information and its quick retrieval whenever required for performing the cognitive tasks.
ii) Long-term memory: This refers to the storage of information on a more permanent basis, or over a relatively long period of time, which can be retrieved whenever required, either consciously or unconsciously.
Information received from the sensory organs and that received during interaction with the outside world is processed initially at the short-term memory storehouse, and depending upon the type of information and perceived requirements, selected information may be transferred to long-term memory for permanent storage. The processing of information in short-term memory involves important cognitive tasks such as reasoning, learning, and understanding. A cognitive task may be defined as a task that involves one or more aspects such as representation of information and knowledge, thought processes relating to these representations, analysis of information leading to development of strategies to achieve the pre-set goals etc. and may require mental processes such as attention, memory, judgement, decision-making etc. The complexity of a cognitive task depends on the load exerted on the working memory during its execution.
