The Cognition Project

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is from an interview with Daniel Kahneman from 2015. Kahneman helped to spread the approach cognitive psychologists had developed to other fields, leading to the creation of behavioral economics. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics for these contributions in 2002. 

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.Dedre Gentner’s research has helped us understand how people form analogies, and the broader importance of relations in human cognition. Her story of becoming a cognitive scientist features some of the people we have already met, like Donald Norman, as well as an eyewitness account of the first cognitive science conference.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about Douglas Hofstadter who wrote the book Godel Escher Bach. The book was responsible for many contemporary cognitive scientists entering the field. His own journey passes through music, physics, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science in a way that really reflects the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about George Lakoff, who was excited and then disappointed by Chomsky’s approach to linguistics. Lakoff ended up taking a new approach to understanding language: cognitive linguistics.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.One of the central questions of cognitive science is how we represent the world around us, organizing it into categories. Eleanor Rosch offered a new perspective on this question, providing clear evidence that categories have fuzzy boundaries that cannot easily be captured using logical rules.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about Donald Norman, who had a rich career that crossed from the East to the West Coast, from engineering to psychology, and from academia to industry. Norman also played a key role in the creation of the Cognitive Science Society, its first conference, and the first cognitive science department. 

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.Our story of the origins of cognitive science has so far been focused in the United States, but a similar awareness of new ways to study the mind was growing on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom. In this episode we hear from Phil Johnson-Laird who witnessed some of the early days of British cognitive psychology and developed his own influential account of human reasoning.

The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Ewart Thomas, who offers a final perspective on the mathematical psychology scene at Stanford as well as a bridge to the early days of cognitive psychology in England.