What is the cognitive lens?
cognition [,käg’ . ni . sh . ən] noun - the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
Cognition and its underlying principles are powerful tools to use in understanding and interacting with the world, and Cognitive Lens is my attempt to explore how related but often isolated fields together through a cognitive perspective. Many of these fields are already being brought together by the Cognitive Science community, a field pioneered a number of professors at the University of California in San Diego. Cognitive Science has rapidly gained traction at many universities worldwide, with excellent graduate programs in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and of course a number of universities in the United States.
Some of this growth is no doubt due to the superficial appeal of bringing its component fields together. It is exciting to think about using linguistics to determine principles in artificial intelligence (and bring the Turing Test within reach), applying neuroscience to developing computer science principles (distributed and ubiquitous computing, here we come), connecting human development studies to anthropology (children wage war almost daily in some contexts), using cognitive psychology in exploring computer interfaces (the social networking possibilities of multi-touch?), and bringing industrial designers into conversation with engineers (imagine the potential there!). These applications are cutting edge, but unlike much research in the natural sciences, they’re not obscure. They are very real and can have an influence on what you and I will be doing over the next few years as well as the next few decades. Cognition, as a unifying framework, introduces a human side to previously mechanical fields.
The question every cognitive scientist tries to answer is “How can cognition focus and harness the potential of disparate fields to effectively address real world challenges?”. You will rarely find a cognitive scientist who works alone, stuck in a lab. Lab work is critical, but requires the researcher to constantly keep people in mind. Researchers in cognitive science find little appeal in the idea of an ivory tower, where knowledge for knowledge’s sake reigns supreme. It’s a science, sure. Observe, hypothesize, test, theorize, observe… the methodology is similar, but not identical because it doesn’t seek unification nearly so strongly as the traditional sciences - the input and output to and from the real world (i.e. society) is critical and highly ingrained into the process.
The risk of such a powerful set of tools is that they may eventually lose their ability (or the researchers’ desire) to work effectively together. Division would break the interdisciplinary nature of the field and return each perspective to isolation. Luckily the youth of not only Cognitive Science, but also the fields it comprises has so far resulted in a great deal of enthusiasm and energy - few researchers in these fields have failed to show genuine excitement and curiosity about not only their work, but others exploring the cognitive sciences. It’s invigorating, and it is this energy that ultimately pushes the field forward.
If you’re not in the cognitive sciences, but you think your interests may connect somewhere, talk to someone in the field, and see what happens.
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