Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Edited by:
  • Peter Collins
Elsevier. 12/yr. Europe £475, USA $775 (institutional); Europe £85, USA £140 (personal)
Credit: ALFRED PASIEKA/ SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The late twentieth century has seen a number of fundamental transformations in the study of the mind. For decades, ending in the 1960s, behaviourism dominated psychology. Its basic tenet was that observable entities such as stimulus and response were the only legitimate subject matter of a scientific psychology, and that the mental states intervening between stimulus and response were beyond the scope of objective inquiry.

This view was challenged by the advent of cognitive psychology, sometimes dated to the 1967 publication of a book by that name by Ulric Neisser. The explicit goal of cognitive psychology was to characterize, in objective, mechanistic terms, the mental machinery underlying such cognitive processes as perception, attention, learning, memory, language and problem-solving. A key idea in cognitive psychology was the ‘computer analogy’, according to which the mind is to the brain as the software is to the hardware of a computer. When viewed this way, mental states no longer seemed the airy fairy stuff of behaviourist critiques, but information-processing states of a physical mechanism, and hence well within the grasp of science.

Within ten years, the phrase ‘cognitive science’ had entered our vocabularies, and marked another important turn in the history of the field. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary endeavour encompassing cognitive psychology, computer science, neuroscience and linguistics. The relevance of computer science and neuroscience is obvious for a field defined by its mind-brain/software-hardware analogy. Linguistics also became involved, partly because language is one of the more spectacular forms of cognitive ability possessed by humans, and partly because some believe that natural language is a representational system that shares properties with mental representation.

If ever a field needed a journal devoted to reviewing current trends, it would be a new interdisciplinary field like cognitive science. Only the youngest practitioners have had the benefit of formal training in more than one or two of its component disciplines, the rest of us having retooled as best we could mid-career. And whatever one's training, it would be difficult to keep entirely up to speed with all four strands of the subject. Trends in Cognitive Sciences is therefore most welcome.

Each issue features state-of-the-art reviews of a variety of areas in cognitive science, mostly by well-known authorities. The editors have managed to enforce an accessible style of writing in most of the articles, and the overall look of the journal is attractive and fun. Indeed, whereas all of my other journals are shelved in my office at the university, my copies of Trends in Cognitive Sciences are piled on my bookcase at home. As solid as their scientific content is, they seem more like pleasure than business.