Introduction to <i>topiCS</i> Volume 17, Issue 1

This Topics in Cognitive Science issue starts the new year off with two collections entirely devoted to excellent and award-winning research: two additions to the (ongoing) topic honoring the Fellows of our Society and a handful of award-winning papers from our annual conference, CogSci, last year. The first topic aims to introduce the fellows of the Cognitive Science Society to a broad and diverse audience beyond the Fellows’ own field and, in so doing, to help bridge the disciplines that together constitute cognitive science (Bender, 2022). In the 3 years since its inception, the Fellows Topic has had the honor to host such overarching and integrative contributions from six outstanding scholars, who are joined now by two great thinkers: Nancy J. Nersessian (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) and Peter Gärdenfors (Lund University, Sweden). The honor of kicking this off belongs to Nancy J. Nersessian, grande dame of the philosophy of (cognitive) science. Her commitment to the Cognitive Science Society had her chair its Fellows Inaugural Committee (2001/02) and serve as president of the Society (2003/04), and in 2009, she was elected a Fellow herself. Having started off as a natural scientist and culminating as a cognitive scientist, she has helped to create—and uniquely shaped—an entire research field in her own way, the cognitive science of science. In “How do scientists think?” (Nersessian, in press), she presents this lifelong research program by interweaving it with her academic biography, thereby illustrating not just “how scientists think” more generally, but also how this applies to this particular scientist. Her Fellows paper is a passionate account of research into the nature of scientific thinking, to which she hopes (as she confided to me) to recruit more young researchers. The second contribution to this topic is different both in style and content. Its author, Peter Gärdenfors, is Sweden's likely most eminent philosopher and professor emeritus of cognitive science in one of the oldest universities in Northern Europe. He has been elected to several scientific academies, was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee for economics for 6 years, and became a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2016. His academic work, too, is characterized by crossing disciplinary boundaries, from philosophy to cognitive science and deep into questions in linguistics. For his Fellows contribution, “The geometry and dynamics of meaning” (Gärdenfors, in press), he chose a less biographical approach and instead provides a highly educational introduction to his influential theory of conceptual space, aimed at modeling why and how even very young minds are able to map words onto meaning when learning a language. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1000 words). Commentaries (between 1000 and 2000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).