title: Interfacing Mind and Environment: The Central Role of Search in Cognition.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
authors.forename: Wai-Tat
authors.initials: WT
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Warwick.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hills
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Science Program and Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington.
authors.forename: Peter M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Todd
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology; D011340:Problem Solving
keywords: Cognitive search; Exploration-exploitation trade-off; Resource distributions; Search