Fundamentals of Cognitive Science draws on research from psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, evolution, and neuroscience to provide an engaging and student-friendly introduction to this interdisciplinary field. While structured around traditional cognitive psychology topics, from attention, learning theory, and memory to information processing, thinking, and decision making, the book also looks at neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, and magic to illustrate cognitive science principles.

The book is organized around the history of thinking about the mind and its relation to the world. It considers the evolution of cognition and how it demonstrates how our current thinking about cognitive processes is derived from pre-scientific philosophies and common sense, through psychologists' empirical inquiries into mind and behavior as they pursued a science of cognition and the construction of artificial intelligences. The architectures of cognition are also applied throughout, and the book proposes a synthesis of them, from traditional symbol system architectures to recent work in embodied cognition and Bayesian predictive processing. Practical and policy implications are also considered but solutions are left for the readers to determine.

Using extended case studies to address the most important themes, ideas, and findings, this book is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and related fields. It is also suitable for general readers interested in an accessible treatment of cognitive science and its practical implications.

Please visit www.fundamentalsofcognitivescience.com for further resources to accompany the book.

Thomas Leahey is Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. He has been President of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and the Society for the History of Psychology. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Founding Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Fundamentals of Cognitive Science draws on research from psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, evolution, and neuroscience to provide an engaging and student-friendly introduction to this interdisciplinary field. Whilst structured around traditional cognitive psychology topics, from attention, learning theory, and memory, to information processing, thinking and decision-making, the book also looks at neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, and magic to illustrate cognitive science principles.

The book is organized around the history of thinking about the mind and its relation to the world. It considers evolution of cognition and how it demonstrates how our current thinking about cognitive processes is derived from pre-scientific philosophies and common sense, through psychologists' empirical inquiries into mind and behavior as they pursued a science of cognition and the construction of artificial intelligences. The architectures of cognition are also applied throughout, and the book proposes a synthesis of them, from traditional symbol system architectures, to recent work in embodied cognition and Bayesian predictive processing. Practical and policy implications are also considered but solutions are left for the readers to determine.

Using extended case studies to address the most important themes, ideas, and findings, this book is suitable for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and related fields. It is also suitable for general readers interested in accessible treatment of cognitive science and its practical implications.

Please visit www.fundamentalsofcognitivescience.com for further resources to accompany the book.

1. Introduction: What is cognitive science? 2. Historical Background: What is a mind? 3. Mind Design: Can we build one? 4. Learning: How do organisms adapt? 5. Early Information Processing: How do we know the world? 6. Memory: How do we know our personal and collective past? 7. The Higher Mental Processes: Are people rational? 8. Evolutionary Psychology: How did mind arise and evolve? 9. Cognitive Neuroscience: How does the brain run the mind? 10. Conclusion: Where do we go from here?