section_path: Fields and methods of inquiry/Cognitive science
section_name: Cognitive science
paragraph_text: Cognitive science
  
  Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mental processes. It aims to overcome the challenge of understanding something as complex as the mind by integrating research from diverse fields ranging from psychology and neuroscience to philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Unlike these disciplines, it is not a unified field but a collaborative effort. One difficulty in synthesizing their insights is that each of these disciplines explores the mind from a different perspective and level of abstraction while using different research methods to arrive at its conclusion.
  
  Cognitive science aims to overcome this difficulty by relying on a unified conceptualization of minds as information processors. This means that mental processes are understood as computations that retrieve, transform, store, and transmit information. For example, perception retrieves sensory information from the environment and transforms it to extract meaningful patterns that can be used in other mental processes, such as planning and decision-making. Cognitive science relies on different levels of description to analyze cognitive processes; the most abstract level focuses on the basic problem the process is supposed to solve and the reasons why the organism needs to solve it; the intermediate level seeks to uncover the algorithm as a formal step-by-step procedure to solve the problem; the most concrete level asks how the algorithm is implemented through physiological changes on the level of the brain. Another methodology to deal with the complexity of the mind is to analyze the mind as a complex system composed of individual subsystems that can be studied independently of one another.