The study of how minds work, drawing on psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and computer science together. It asks how people perceive, remember, reason, learn and use language. AI borrows ideas from it and gives it new tools in return, though how far AI systems actually resemble human thinking is hotly debated.
Technical view
Took shape in the 1950s as a reaction against behaviourism, treating the mind as an information processor whose internal representations could be studied, with Chomsky’s linguistics and early AI as key influences. Debates between symbolic and connectionist accounts of cognition mirror those in AI, and ideas such as reinforcement, attention and working memory have travelled in both directions. Researchers compare network internals with brain recordings and test language models on psychological tasks; whether success on such tasks reflects human-like understanding or surface pattern matching remains disputed.
Related
Part of AI Terminology Index, section: Adjacent Fields.