Interfacing Mind and Environment: The Central Role of Search in Cognition

Search can be found in almost every cognitive activity, ranging across vision, memory retrieval, problem solving, decision making, foraging, and social interaction. Because of its ubiquity, research on search has a tendency to fragment into multiple areas of cognitive science. The proposed topic aim...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Topics in cognitive science 2015-07, Vol.7 (3), p.384-390
Main Authors: Fu, Wai-Tat, Hills, Thomas, Todd, Peter M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Cognition - physiology
Cognitive search
Decision Making - physiology
Environment
Exploration-exploitation trade-off
Humans
Memory - physiology
Mental Processes - physiology
Problem Solving
Resource distributions
Search
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Summary:Search can be found in almost every cognitive activity, ranging across vision, memory retrieval, problem solving, decision making, foraging, and social interaction. Because of its ubiquity, research on search has a tendency to fragment into multiple areas of cognitive science. The proposed topic aims at providing integrative discussion of the central role of search from multiple perspectives. We focus on controlled search processes, which require (a) a goal, (b) uncertainty about the nature, location, or acquisition method of the objects to be searched for, and (c) a method for sampling through the search environment. While this definition of search is general and applicable to different domains, the specific mechanisms in the search process will likely differ. The goal of this issue is to compare and contrast how these search processes are similar and differ in different cognitive activities, with the goal of understanding the general nature of search in terms of the three characteristics stated above. We expect that given its cross‐domain nature, the topic on search will be of broad interest to cognitive scientists, including psychologists, behavioral ecologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, linguists, and sociologists.
ISSN:1756-8757
1756-8765
DOI:10.1111/tops.12153