Interdisciplinary Cognitive Science Projects

Some nice quotes on the nature of interdisciplinarity:

• "Knowledge in the world is exploding. Up until this point we had [academic] subjects, and a person would identify themselves with what I call the vertices of a graph. One vertex would be mathematics. Another vertex would be biology. Another vertex would be computer science, a new one. There would be a physics vertex, and so on. People identified themselves as vertices, because these were the specialties. You could live in that vertex, and you would be able to understand most of the lectures that were given by your colleagues.

  "Knowledge is growing to the point where nobody can say they know all of mathematics, certainly. But there's so much interdisciplinary work now. We see that a mathematician can study the printing industry, and some of the ideas of dynamic programming apply to book publishing. Wow! There are interactions galore wherever you look. My model of the future is that people won't identify themselves with vertices, but rather with edges—with the connections between two other areas, and they identify themselves by the two subspecialites that they have a talent for."

  • Donald Knuth, as quoted in Shustek, Len (ed.) (2008), "Donald Knuth: A Life's Work Interrupted" (an interview by Edward Feigenbaum), Communications of the ACM 51(8) (August): 31-35; quote on p.35 (emphasis added).

• "Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn't realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn't realize were problems."
  • Gladwell, Malcolm (2008), "In the Air", The New Yorker (12 May): 50-60; quote on p.59.

1. UB Center for Cognitive Science Research Groups

2. Gardner, Howard (1987), The Mind's New Science, new edition (New York: Basic Books).
   • Part III: "Toward an Integrated Cognitive Science: Present Efforts, Future Prospects", pp.291-393, discusses interdisciplinary research projects on perception, mental imagery, categorization, rationality, and mental representation.

3. Stillings, Neil A.; Feinstein, Mark H.; Garfield, Jay L.; Rissland, Edwina L.; Rosenbaum, David A.; Weisler, Steven E.; & Baker-Ward, Lynne (1987), Cognitive Science: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), §1.5: "The Interdisciplinary Nature of Cognitive Science", pp.10-16.
   • Contains a subsection titled "The Five Disciplines Consider a Three-Letter Word", which outlines an interdisciplinary investigation of the definite article "the".
   • To get a username and password, contact Bill Rapaport.

4. Deictic Centers and the Cognitive Structure of Narrative Comprehension website
   • Powerpoint slides

5. Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: from algorithm to curriculum website
   • Powerpoint slides