Cognitive Science: An Introduction

This chapter presents a general introduction to basic concepts in cognitive science. This chapter provides a common framework to organize the basic knowledge: the human information processing (HIP) system. The HIP is a framework that represents different subsystems including the perceptual system, the motor system, and the cognitive system. The perceptual and motor systems are briefly discussed first. Then, the cognitive systems and its different subsystems including memory and attention, learning, problem solving, and decision making are discussed. This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the current knowledge in cognitive science, but rather a general introduction of the most fundamental processes and the well-known findings about HIP’s different subsystems. It is expected that this introduction would help readers to obtain a general overview of cognitive science and of cognitive psychology topics that are relevant for cardiovascular interventions.