Author: Hiran Ekanayake
Date: 8 Mar 2005

The word first came into my research vocabulary while I reading the research paper [P001001]. I got immunized from the scope I gained as a result of reading the paper and thinking about the solution I get to solve the conflict I had. I was recently initiated a formal research activity into robotics but I was at bit frustrate* how I progress with it in the future. However the opportunity opened by the scope showed me a way to combine my research activities so that I will be able to remain and survive in both research activities. The following content meditated to translate my picture of understanding into words. Decision of how successful is up to you!

I started for “What is cognition?”

When I was on the process of finding an answer to this question I found lot of keywords and the following were among them,
Perception, Sensation
Also I found many forms for the word,
Cognitive informatics, cognitive psychology, cognitive modeling

I didn’t find any further explanation to “cognitive informatics” even after I made a keyword search in the Internet. Every link finally pointed me onto “cognitive psychology”. I expected the meaning to be “computer science influenced study into biological cognitive science” which I gained from the understanding I have for bioinformatics. As a result I was weakened to accept only the biological part as suggested by cognitive psychology. Finally references were able to hand me over to cognitive modeling extreme as well. The reference [P001002] explained the subject as the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence: psychology + philosophy + artificial intelligence + neuroscience + linguistics + anthropology. Then my immediate question was what those are and how/why they relate to cognition? The answers would be simple as,

Psychology: Study of the minds of humans and other animals
Philosophy: Study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, existence, and morality
Artificial Intelligence: The study of how computers can be programmed to perceive, reason, and act
Neuroscience: Study of the structure and functioning of brains
Linguistics: The analytic study of human language
Anthropology: The study of the origins, distribution, social relations, and culture of human beings
When I look into these subject areas I got distorted and I taught I would never be able to end my study.

Meanwhile a different access point [P001003] solved my problem. I got the answer when it tries to differentiate artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling as,

AI aims to make machines intelligent, regardless of whether the processes they use are like those used in human thinking. In cognitive modeling, the point of computional models is to increase understanding of human thinking. Historically, however, some of the most important ideas in AI have come about because of cognitive modelling, e.g. rule-based systems and artificial neural networks.

Further readings introduced me following areas to be looked at.
Emotional Cognition, Consciousness

Second Writing
Date: 21 Mar 2005

Cognitive Informatics

I got enriched with definitions after I read the research paper “On Cognitive Informatics” [P001007]. It defines “Informatics”. As I understood it is like this,

In classical informatics a bit is concerned as the information unit. So the length is fixed, for example “e” and “x” are two information units. However according to the modern informatics an information unit is the minimal bit stream that has the ability to give a message. So the unit varies, for example “man” and “go” are two information units, but “e” is not an information unit for us. However it depends on the system.

In cognitive informatics the information unit is something different than other two definitions. It’s about human perception. The information gained by the word “man” for me is different from what information gained by you. It depends on our cognitive system. Sometimes the information given for me by the word “man” is similar to the information given to you by the word “person”. Therefore I guess that you could understand the complexity of this new discipline.

To be continued!

References