Cognitive science
![Figure illustrating the fields that contributed to the birth of cognitive science, including linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology.[1]](/Images/godic/202501/05/Cognitive_Science_Hexagon.svg0507.png")
![A well known example of a Phrase structure tree. This is one way of representing human language that shows how different components are organized hierarchically.](/Images/godic/202501/05/Cgisf-tgg.svg0507.png")
![The Necker cube, an example of an optical illusion](/Images/godic/202501/05/Necker_cube.svg0507.png")
![An optical illusion. The square A is exactly the same shade of gray as square B. See checker shadow illusion.](/Images/godic/202501/05/Grey_square_optical_illusion0507.PNG")
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behaviour, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (humans or other animals) and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. The fundamental concept of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."