Psychologists also help to assess mental health problems and provide possible treatment plans to overcome those problems. The field of psychology is also vast and diverse and includes subfields like clinical psychology, criminal psychology, behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology etc. Psychology also studies cognition, attention, memory apart from emotion, personality, intelligence, brain functioning and interpersonal relationships. The field of clinical psychology also helps to resolve certain behavioural issues that affect interpersonal relationships as in father-son, husband – wife, siblings etc. The field studies about why two individuals behave in two different ways in the same given situation. They try to establish a link between thinking and behaviour. People who practice psychology are called as psychologists. It tries to analyse how a person thinks and behaves as an individual and in society at the same time taking into account physiological and biological aspects of behaviour. Psychology on the other hand is an academic and applied subject that involves the scientific study of mental functions and human behaviour. Cognitive science covers mainly artificial intelligence, knowledge and processing of language, learning and development, attention, memory, perception and action. Though cognitive science is a large field and it covers many topics, certain topics like social and cultural issues, emotions, consciousness etc. It is a real science as it is objective and not dependent on the bias of the observer. The field tries to understand the neuronal circuitry and the related brain organization which is linked to memory and decision making. It analyses basic low level learning to complex decision mechanisms, thinking and logical planning. Cognitive science helps us to establish a relationship between the neuronal activity and the resultant behavioural change. To understand the process of memorising the phone number and address you need to study the change occurring in the human behaviour and the ongoing neuronal activity at the same time. When the person first sees the data, there is some neuronal activity along with behavioural changes. Suppose a person is given an address and phone number to memorise and recall at a later date.

Let us understand this from a simple example. It tries to understand the various activities occurring in the nervous system and computer when they try to process the incoming information for future use. Cognitive science aims at studying about how any information is represented, assimilated, processed and transformed into other information or action.

The field of cognitive science includes studies on human and artificial intelligence as well as human behaviour. The field has an interdisciplinary approach and uses ideas and methodologies from other related fields such as psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy and neuroscience.

What is Cognitive Science?Ĭognitive science is the scientific study of the human mind. Let us understand the subtle points that differentiate the two terms. Cognitive science is a sub specialty of psychology. Cognitive science and Psychology both deal with the study of human mind and behaviour.

Ucsd cogs major