Cognitive science

A central tenet of cognitive science is that a complete understanding of the mind/brain cannot be attained by studying only a single level.

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience says "the new sciences of the mind need to enlarge their horizon to encompass both lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience".[5] This can be provided by a functional level account of the process. Studying a particular phenomenon from multiple levels creates a better understanding of the processes that occur in the brain to give rise to a particular behavior.

Marr[6] gave a famous description of three levels of analysis: The computational theory , specifying the goals of the computation;Representation and algorithms , giving a representation of the inputs and outputs and the algorithms which transform one into the other; andThe hardware implementation, or how algorithm and representation may be physically realized.

The earliest entries for the word "cognitive" in the OED take it to mean roughly "pertaining to the action or process of knowing". The first entry, from 1586, shows the word was at one time used in the context of discussions of Platonic theories of knowledge. Most in cognitive science, however, presumably do not believe their field is the study of anything as certain as the knowledge sought by Plato

Language is acquired within the first few years of life, and all humans under normal circumstances are able to acquire language proficiently.

A major driving force in the theoretical linguistic field is discovering the nature that language must have in the abstract in order to be learned in such a fashion.

Linguistics often divides language processing into orthography, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Main articles: Learning and Developmental psychology

Memory allows us to store information for later retrieval.

Memory is also often grouped into declarative and procedural forms.

Declarative memory—grouped into subsets of semantic and episodic forms of memory

Procedural memory allows us to remember actions and motor sequences (e.g. how to ride a bicycle) and is often dubbed implicit knowledge or memory .

Perception is the ability to take in information via the senses, and process it in some way. Vision and hearing are two dominant senses that allow us to perceive the environment. Some questions in the study of visual perception, for example, include: (1) How are we able to recognize objects?, (2) Why do we perceive a continuous visual environment, even though we only see small bits of it at any one time? One tool for studying visual perception is by looking at how people process optical illusions. The image on the right of a Necker cube is an example of a bistable percept, that is, the cube can be interpreted as being oriented in two different directions.

Consciousness is the awareness whether something is an external object or something within oneself. This helps the mind with having the ability to experience or feel a sense of self.