Cognitive Science is the study of intelligent systems,
whether computational or human. Cognitive Science as a research discipline was begun
in the late 1950s by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon University
with their studies of humans solving tasks in symbolic logic. The Cognitive Science
tradition uses computational representation and search techniques as potential
models of human perceptual and problem solving performance. These models, from a
cognitive perspective, can shed light on the nature of human intelligence and can,
from a computational perspective, help us design and build better algorithms for
expressing intelligent performance.
A Cognitive Science program has been active at UNM for almost twenty years. Begun by
professors from the Computer Science and Psychology Departments (George Luger and Peder
Johnson) it quickly expanded to contain members from Linguists, Philosophy, Anthro pology,
and Electrical Engineering. The book Cognitive Science: the Science of
Intelligent Systems (Luger 1994) is a reflection of the work in Cognitive science at UNM.
Current projects include finding analogical relations in data sets, the analysis of human
diagnostic skills, and the development of representations that evolve to reflect the
evolution of meanings in dynamic environments.