History of Cognitive Science

Cognitive science was born in the 1950s when a group of researchers from different fields grew frustrated with the limitations of behaviorism and began studying the mind in a new way. This "cognitive revolution" changed the direction of psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, creating an entirely new scientific discipline.

This is the story of how it happened.

Before cognitive science: The behaviorist era

The first half of the 20th century was the reign of behaviorism. Psychologists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner argued that scientific psychology could only study externally observable behavior. The mind was a "black box" that couldn't and needn't be examined from within.

Behaviorism produced valuable research on learning and behavior modification. But it couldn't explain language, thinking, or creativity. How does a child learn to speak? How does a person solve a problem they've never encountered before? Behaviorism offered no answers.

1956: The birth year

The historically most significant turning point occurred in 1956. That year, several events together launched the cognitive revolution:

George Miller's paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" demonstrated that human short-term memory can process about seven units at a time. This was one of the first studies to describe the mind's internal processes quantitatively.

Noam Chomsky's grammar challenged the behaviorist view of language learning. Chomsky argued that language cannot be merely learned behavior—children must know language's deep structure to produce sentences they've never heard before.

The Dartmouth conference brought together researchers who founded artificial intelligence as a discipline. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon began building programs that simulated thinking.

Newell and Simon presented Logic Theorist, a program that could prove mathematical theorems. For the first time, a machine did something that looked like intelligent problem-solving.

The 1960s: A new paradigm establishes itself

The cognitive revolution progressed rapidly. Researchers began seeing the mind as an information processing system that could be studied like a computer.

Ulric Neisser published Cognitive Psychology in 1967, giving the new approach its name and defining its research areas: perception, attention, memory, language, thinking.

The computer as model – Era researchers began describing the mind in computer terms: input, processing, output, memory, programs. This "computational mind" idea remains at the core of cognitive science.

Linguistics transformed – Chomsky's generative grammar revolutionized linguistics. The question was no longer just what people say, but what they know in order to say it.

The 1970s: Cognitive science becomes a discipline

In the 1970s, scattered research began coming together:

1975 – Alfred Sloan Foundation began funding multidisciplinary cognition research 1977 – First Cognitive Science journal founded 1979 – Cognitive Science Society established

Researchers from different fields—psychologists, linguists, philosophers, AI researchers, neuroscientists—began seeing themselves as representatives of the same discipline.

The 1980s: Connectionism and neural networks

The 1980s saw the emergence of an alternative view of how the mind computes:

Connectionism argued that the mind doesn't work like a conventional computer but like a neural network. Rumelhart and McClelland published Parallel Distributed Processing in 1986, introducing neural network models to cognition research.

Connectionism better explained many phenomena: how we recognize faces, how we learn gradual categories, how memory is distributed.

Meanwhile neuroscience developed rapidly. New brain imaging methods—first PET, then fMRI—made it possible to observe brain activity in living humans.

The 1990s: Decade of the brain

U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared the 1990s the "decade of the brain." Neuroscience funding grew, and cognitive neuroscience established itself as its own field.

Key developments:

fMRI imaging became widespread
Cognitive neuroscience combined psychological theories with brain research
Consciousness research regained respectability
The internet enabled new forms of collaboration

The 2000s and beyond: AI's return

The 2000s saw a turn that connected cognitive science's roots to its present:

Deep learning brought neural networks back into the spotlight. Since 2012, deep neural networks have achieved human-level performance in image recognition, speech recognition, and language processing.

Large language models (GPT, Claude, etc.) have rekindled questions that were on the cognitive science founders' agenda: What is understanding? Can a machine think? What distinguishes human intelligence from artificial?

Embodied cognition challenged the traditional "mind as computer" metaphor. Perhaps the mind isn't a separate program running in the brain but an embodied, environmentally embedded process.