Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science

Cognitive science studies how the human mind works (mental processes), drawing from various disciplines such as psychology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), linguistics, and neuroscience. AI regards the human brain as an information-processing device. As correctly pointed by allen98, most previous definitions of AI use the word intelligence in its definition, leaving the term completely unexplained. allen98 gives a one-sentence definition of AI as ``AI is the science of making machines do tasks that humans can do or try to do''.

Two additional clarifications may be added to his definition. First, we do not require a single machine or AI system to do all the tasks that humans can do. Significant progress has been made in various areas of artificial intelligence (see later) in the last 40 years. Second, AI strives to outperform or surpass in doing tasks that humans can do, by certain performance measurements. Therefore, we want to build not just a chess-playing computer, but one that wins the game against the best human players.

Progresses made in various areas of AI can be linked with the multiple intelligence theory of gardner83:

1.

Linguistic intelligence - computational linguistics, spoken language recognition and synthesis, etc.

2.

Logical-mathematical intelligence - logical reasoning, problem solving, etc.

3.

Spatial intelligence - computer vision, spatial and imagery reasoning

4.

Musical intelligence - AI and music understanding and creation

5.

Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence - robotics

6.

Interpersonal intelligence - AI agents that interact to each other

7.

Intrapersonal intelligence - self-awareness and emotion in AI

In various areas of AI, researchers have succeeded in constructing AI systems that match or surpass human performance []<for example,>ling93j2,ling93j1. Many general and powerful principles, methodologies, and algorithms, originating in human introspection and intuition, have been developed. They are able to solve a variety of problems in a certain domain.

This gave us a new idea: many of these AI principles and methods can be taught back to humans to improve our thinking abilities and skills. This would be especially beneficial to children, since childhood is the critical period to learn thinking skills. Learning high-level thinking skills is also the central task of the current education.