---
title: Introduction to Cognitive Science
description: This topic provides an interdisciplinary overview of the mind and intelligence, combining psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. You will understand how the brain processes information, represents knowledge, and generates complex behaviors like language, memory, and perception.
category: social-sciences
subcategory: cognitive-science
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/introduction-to-cognitive-science
---

# Introduction to Cognitive Science

This topic provides an interdisciplinary overview of the mind and intelligence, combining psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. You will understand how the brain processes information, represents knowledge, and generates complex behaviors like language, memory, and perception.

## Available Resources

1 Videos • 3 Books • 1 Courses • 1 Websites

## Videos

### 1. You Actually Share Your Brain With a Silent Stranger

Opening lecture of Yale's PSYC 110, surveying what psychology studies and how: brain and mind, development, language, memory, emotion and mental illness. Sets out course structure and the empirical methods the rest of the term applies.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

**Tags:** psychology, cognitive-science, mind-and-brain, introductory-lecture

## Courses

### 1. Introduction to Psychology (MIT 9.00SC)

**Author:** John D. E. Gabrieli

Survey of human nature from mind to brain: perception, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, child development, personality, psychopathology and social behavior. Built for self-study with 24 lecture videos, a free open textbook, check-yourself questions and exams with solutions. Gives a grounded overview of scientific psychology.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/

**Tags:** psychology, cognition, neuroscience, developmental-psychology, psychopathology

## Podcasts

### 1. Many Minds

**Author:** Kensy Cooperrider

A biweekly interview podcast hosted by cognitive scientist Kensy Cooperrider, featuring researchers on how humans, animals, and machines perceive, think, and learn. Episodes cover topics such as animal cognition, language, consciousness, and AI, giving listeners a broad view of current cognitive science.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://disi.org/manyminds/

**Tags:** cognitive-science, comparative-cognition, philosophy-of-mind

### 2. War on the Rocks

**Author:** Ryan Evans

Discussions over drinks with security, defense, and foreign policy insiders and experts. The original War on the Rocks podcast series.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://warontherocks.com

**Tags:** national-security, defense-policy, military-strategy, foreign-policy, podcast

## Books

### 1. Cognitive Science: An Introduction

**Author:** José Luis Bermúdez

Cambridge textbook tracing cognitive science from its 1950s origins through the paradigms that followed: symbolic computation, neural networks, modularity, and neuroscience-driven models. Readers finish able to compare how each framework explains perception, reasoning and language.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1107653355?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, cognitive-science

### 2. Mindware: An Introduction

**Author:** Andy Clark

Philosophical introduction to cognitive science, working through symbolic AI, connectionism, embodied and extended cognition, dynamical systems and robotics. Each chapter pairs the empirical work with the conceptual problems it raises about representation, mind and world.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195138570?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, cognitive-science

### 3. The Mind's New Science

**Author:** Howard Gardner

Narrative history of the cognitive revolution from the 1948 Hixon Symposium onward, tracing how philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence converged into one field. Explains where the discipline's assumptions and internal disputes came from.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465046355?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, cognitive-science

## Websites

### 1. cognitivesciencesociety.org

Official site of the Cognitive Science Society, a professional organization for researchers and educators in cognitive science. It features information about the annual CogSci conference, membership and awards, journals and publications, news, events, and resources for researchers and educators.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://cognitivesciencesociety.org

**Tags:** websites, humanities-social-sciences, cognitive-science

---

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