Cognitive systems include both natural
and artificial information processing systems
responsible for perception, learning,
reasoning, communication, action and more.
Although we can trace the emergence of
a field of study concerned with such systems
back to the nineteenth century, its
modern focus on information processing is
more readily traced to a series of critical
advances in the twentieth century. Among
these must be included work by Alan Turing
on computability, by Frederick Bartlett on
the role of schemas, by Kenneth Craik on
the importance of internal ‘models’, by
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts on the
use of idealized neurons as logical devices,
by John von Neumann on game theory and
the development of computers, and by
Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon on
information theory