Cognitive sciences and technologies

Cognitive science evolved throughout the 20th century, introducing paradigms based on schemata (Bartlett, Piaget, Minsky), information processing (Simon, Neisser), embodied cognition (Rosch, Lakoff, Mandler), neuroscience (Edelman, Damasio, Dehaene), and integrative models (Barsalou, Friston). This evolution has been accompanied by philosophical propositions, such as the extended mind (Clark) and the neurophilosophy (Churchland), as well as by technological paradigms of simulation and artificial intelligence. The latter include knowledge representation (McCarthy, Brachman), computational ontologies of naïve physics (Hayes, Gruber), multi-agent and collective systems (Sloman, Castelfranchi, Minsky), connectionism (Rumelhart, Parisi), reinforcement learning (Sutton, Schmidhuber), and neuro-symbolic AI (Smolensky, Hitzler).

The contemporary objective of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies is no longer to provide novel answers to traditional research inquiries, but rather to reformulate them through operational approaches that investigate the mind as an empirical phenomenon, partially reproducible through artificial or hybrid systems.

Within this perspective, the simulation of novel scenarios and perceptual-motor constraints via XR technologies affords a new vantage point on embodied, embedded, and situated cognition. The large-scale learning of real and artificial semiotic codes, and of their use by generative AI architectures, enables the automation of previously inconceivable tasks, experiments, and evaluations. This offers an immense horizon of applications, with the potential to refine the sensibilities of humanistic disciplines.

In Italy, the development of this interdisciplinary field has been enhanced by investments from the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan), a program attentive to the importance of scientific, technological, and cultural knowledge transfer.