- Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker , a native of Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. After teaching at MIT for 21 years, he returned to Harvard in 2003 as the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Pinker's experimental research on cognition and language won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association.
- George Lakoff
George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has served for 36 years. Before that, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. His new book is "The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain."
- Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett is currently the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University.
- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century.
- Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky is here critical of many current researchers in artificial intelligence researchers who he feels have gotten bogged down in theories of machine learning. He sees this as a crisis point in a time of an aging population that he feels will need help in performing many tasks. "We have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, but we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case."
- Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic. He is best known for his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (abbreviated as "GEB") which was published in 1979, and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
- Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. Fodor argues that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations.
- Donald Norman
Donald A. Norman is a professor emeritus of cognitive science at University of California, San Diego and a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, but nowadays works mostly with cognitive science in the domain of usability engineering. He also teaches at Stanford University and is a member of the editorial board of Encyclopædia Britannica. He currently splits his time between consulting and his teaching and research at Northwestern and Stanford.
- Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist, linguist and cognitive scientist, currently a Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, CNRS. He is known, amongst other things, for his work on pragmatics and in particular relevance theory; and also for his theory on “epidemiology of representations”. In the early Seventies, Sperber was one of the critics of the French structuralism in anthropology.
- Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science and a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.
- Stevan Harnad
Stevan Harnad Stevan Harnad ( http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad ) did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University and is currently Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at University of Québec/Montréal. His research is on categorisation, communication and cognition.
- Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954 in Adelaide) is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003 until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Mark Johnson
Mark L. Johnson (born 24 May 1949 in Kansas City, Missouri) is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as "Metaphors We Live By". However, he has also written extensively on philosophical topics such as John Dewey, Kant and ethics.
- Mark Turner
Mark Turner is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He was previously Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Turner has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, …
- Eleanor Rosch
Eleanor Rosch is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization. She also created prototype theory in linguistics. Her work has been influential on her Berkeley colleague George Lakoff and her coauthor the philosophical biologist Francisco Varela.
- Allen Newell
Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert Simon).
- Daniel Levitin
"This Is Your Brain on Music" official website.
- Zenon Pylyshyn
Zenon Pylyshyn received a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Saskatchewan in 1963. He spent two years as a Canada Council Senior fellow and then joined the faculty at the University of Western Ontario in London. In 1994 he joined the faculty of Rutgers University. Pylyshyn is recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Donald O. Hebb Award from the Canadian Psychological Association.
- Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program. SHRDLU was written in the years from 1968-70. In making the program Winograd was concerned with the problem of providing a computer with sufficient "understanding" to be able to use natural language.
- Paul Smolensky
Paul Smolensky (born May 5, 1955) is a professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University. With Alan Prince he developed Optimality Theory, a controversial but influential theory about the organization of phonology. Smolensky is the recipient of the 2005 Rumelhart Prize for his pursuit of the ICS Architecture, a model of cognition that aims to unify Connectionism and symbolism, …
- Amos Tversky
Amos Tversky (March 16, 1937 - June 2, 1996) was a pioneer of cognitive science, a longtime collaborator of Daniel Kahneman, and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement. He was co-author of a three-volume treatise, Foundations of Measurement (recently reprinted). His early work with Kahneman focused on the psychology of prediction and probability judgment.
- Tim van Gelder
Tim van Gelder is an Australian cognitive scientist. He is Principal Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne, and CEO of Austhink, an Australian software development and consulting company. He was educated at the University of Melbourne (BA, 1984) and University of Pittsburgh (PhD, 1989), …
- Gilles Fauconnier
Gilles Fauconnier (pronounced) (born August 19, 1944) is a French linguist, researcher in cognitive science, and author, currently working in the US. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Cognitive Science. His work with Mark Turner founded the theory of conceptual blending.
- Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello (born 18 January 1950 in Bartow, Florida) is a cognitive psychologist and the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Tomasello works with the psycholinguistics of children's language and subscribes to the cognitive linguistics school of psychology. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, …
- Elizabeth Bates
Elizabeth Bates (July 26, 1947 - December 13, 2003) was professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Bates was a founding member of the UCSD department of Cognitive Science, the first such department in the United States. She was also the director of the UCSD Center of Research in Language and the co-director of the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders.
- Stephen Stich
Stephen Stich (born May 9, 1943) is a professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is also currently an Honorary Professor of the department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. For the spring of 2007, he is the Clark Way-Harrison visiting professor with the department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and moral psychology.
- Michael Gazzaniga
Michael S. Gazzaniga (born December 12 1939) is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. In 1961, Gazzaniga graduated from Dartmouth College. In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked under the guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research.
- Edwin Hutchins
Prof. Edwin Hutchins earned his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California in 1978. He joined the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD in 1988. His research focuses on the nature of cognitive activity in real-world settings. This is well illustrated in his groundbreaking book, "Cognition In the Wild" (1995, MIT Press). In 1985 Prof. Hutchins was awarded a John D. and Catherine T.MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
- George A. Miller
George A(rmitage) Miller (February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia) is a famous professor of psychology at Princeton University. He formerly served as Professor of Psychology at Rockefeller University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, where he was Chairman of the Department of Psychology. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Oxford University and served as the President of the American Psychological Association.
- Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an influential contemporary linguist who has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that meshes well with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics).
- Elizabeth Spelke
Elizabeth Spelke (born May 28 1949) is a cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She discovered that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she had an important role in the debate on cognitive differences between men and women.
- Adele Goldberg
Adele Eva Goldberg (born November 9, 1963) is a researcher in the field of linguistics. Since 2004, she has been a Professor in Linguistics, and an associated faculty in Psychology at Princeton University. From 1997-2004, she was an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She was also, from 1997 to 1998, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
- David Rumelhart
David E. Rumelhart (b. 1942, Wessington Springs, South Dakota) has made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.
- Rafael E. Núñez
Rafael E. Núñez is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and is well known for promoting the idea of embodied cognition. He co-authored "Where Mathematics Comes From" with George Lakoff.
- Leonard Talmy
Leonard Talmy is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University at Buffalo in New York. He is most famous for his pioneering work in cognitive linguistics, more specifically, in the relationship between semantic and formal linguistic structures and the connections between semantic typologies and universals. He also specializes in the study of Yiddish and Native American linguistics.
- Walter Pitts
Walter Pitts was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology. He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields like cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial intelligence. He is most remembered for having written along with Warren McCulloch, …
- Merlin Donald
Merlin Wilfred Donald (born November 17, 1939) is a Canadian psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, and a researcher, educator, and author in the corresponding fields.
- Ronald Langacker
Ronald W. Langacker (born December 27, 1942) is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of Cognitive Grammar. Langacker received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966. From 1966 until 2003, he was professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.
- Henkjan Honing
Henkjan Honing (born 1959) is a Dutch researcher and musician. He heads the Music Cognition Group (MCG), part of the Department of Musicology, the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA), and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and conducts research in music cognition using theoretical, empirical and computational methods.
- David Kirsh
David Kirsh is a researcher in the area of Cognitive Science. He is currently a Professor and Department Chair at UC San Diego, where he heads the Interactive Cognition Lab. He received his BA from the University of Toronto and his PhD from Oxford University. Prior to arriving at UCSD, he spent 5 years as a research scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. His research interests include interactive design, collaborative environments, …