Application Of Cognitive Science Research Articles

Some Twists in the Cognitive Turn

Contrary to what the name suggests, the recent work of Howard Margolis (1987) and Ronald Giere (1988) demonstrates that the “cognitive turn” in the philosophy of science is not simply the application of cognitive science to the study of science. For one thing, neither one is what Jerry Fodor (1981) has called a “methodological solipsist,” that is, someone who wants to account for thought processes without presupposing an account of the world of which those thoughts are about. Margolis, in fact, comes perilously close to Fodor’s anti-cognitivist foe, J. J. Gibson (1979), whose “ecological” perspective requires that an organism’s thought processes be specified in terms of structures in the environment, “affordances,” capable of satisfying the organism’s desire to know. The Margolian focus on overcoming “barriers” to alternative “habits of mind,” as the psychic basis of Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, only serves to highlight this broadly “functional” side of thinking that typically has no place in cognitive science.

Cognitive design for instructional design

There is strong interest in the field of instructional design in building expert systems that can provide advice to inexperienced instructional designers. This paper questions whether the expert systems model to advice-giving is in fact appropriate for a design process such as instructional design. An alternate approach based on case-based reasoning and the critic approach to advice-giving is considered to be better adapted to the cognitive needs of this task. The cognitive constraints of the task are used to orient the design of an instructional design workbench. The concept of an ID workbench illustrates the direct application of cognitive science to a complex practical task in the area of design.

Cognitive science and decision making research in accounting

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevance of cognitive science to decision-making research in accounting. First, the context into which it interfaces the field of accounting is reviewed. Next, the cognitive science applications to accounting are presented and evaluated as they relate to four levels of investigation. The paper concludes with implications for future research as well as a discussion of methodological issues which must be addressed.

Sequencing Instruction: a Cognitive Science Perspective

Abstarct In 1979 researchers in linguistics, psychology, philosophy and artificial intelligence met at the University of California at San Diego. They shared a common interest: applying the knowledge and skills of their fields of study to describing how human beings process information. The aim of the conference was to christen a new field: cognitive science. Although the work of these researchers is of relatively recent date, one might have expected to find more applications of cognitive science in the field of instruction. Instructional technologists could employ it in the same way that civil or mechanical engineers use fundamental sciences such as physics and chemistry. This paper is written with a view to the application of cognitive science to instructional design. More specifically, it attempts to suggest how the concepts of schemas and semantic networks as studied by Norman, Rumelhart and the LNR research group may be applied to the sequencing of verbal information instruction. In the first part of...

Life-span components of text processing: structural and procedural differences

The present study investigated discourse processing in young, aged—normal, and aged—memory impaired individuals using materials which were of both general and aged—cohort specific interest. The results of free recall and recognition tasks indicated that reliable quantitative and qualitative differences distinguished the performance of the three groups. Application of the Kintsch and van Dijk model ( W. Kintsch & T. A. van Dijk. Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 1978 , Vol. 85, pp. 363–394.) text processing both supported and enlarged upon this conclusion. the results are interpreted in terms of hypothetical age-related and pathology-related differences in the capacity of working memory and also in the selection process for storage of information in working memory. Lastly, the present application of cognitive science to one particular problem domain (life-span differences in the processing of discourse) is suggested as a model for exploring other applied issues.