Introduction to 30 th Anniversary Perspectives on Cognitive Science : Past , Present , and Future

During the summer of 2008 in Washington, DC, the Cognitive Science Society celebrated the 30th anniversary of its seminal 1979 conference in San Diego. The 2008 conference organizers—Bradley Love, Ken McRae, and Vladimir Sloutsky—commissioned a symposium to celebrate the occasion. In discussing possibilities, we agreed that the symposium should not simply address the Society’s origins and subsequent history, but that it should focus on contributions from the disciplines and theoretical perspectives central to Cognitive Science, along with their future directions. We originally settled on five disciplines and five theoretical perspectives, and then we invited 10 active established researchers to address them at the conference. To accommodate these 10 speakers, two symposia were presented, one on disciplines and one on perspectives. Each speaker was asked to address: (a) What was your discipline ⁄ perspective like at the time of the 1979 conference? (b) How has the discipline ⁄ perspective changed over the past 30 years to what it is today? (c) How do you foresee the discipline ⁄ perspective changing in the next 30 years? Because of time constraints, we could not include all disciplines and perspectives central to Cognitive Science. Fortunately, however, we were able to remedy this limitation by asking additional researchers to contribute articles here. The resulting collection of articles covers disciplines and perspectives that have been central to Cognitive Science for the past 30 years and that are likely to be central for the next 30 years and beyond. Specifically, the disciplines (and the authors addressing them) include the following: