Cognitive science
The term "cognitive science" was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of Artificial Intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal "Cognitive Science" and the Cognitive Science Society were founded. The founding meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held at the University of California, San Diego in 1979, which resulted in cognitive science becoming an internationally visible enterprise. In 1972, Hampshire College started the first undergraduate education program in Cognitive Science, led by Neil Stillings. In 1982, with assistance from Professor Stillings, Vassar College became the first institution in the world to grant an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science. In 1986, the first Cognitive Science Department in the world was founded at the University of California, San Diego.
Developmental cognitive neuroscience
The origin of the discipline of developmental cognitive neuroscience can be traced back to conference held in Philadelphia in 1989 co-funded by NICHD & NIMH, organized by Adele Diamond, that started the process of developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists talking with one another. To bridge the communication gaps, researchers were invited from different fields who were either using the same experimental paradigms to study the same behaviors or were investigating related scientific questions in complementary ways—though they were unaware of one another’s work. They used different words to talk about their work and had different ways of thinking about it, but the concrete, observable behaviors, and the precise experimental conditions under which those behaviors occurred, served to make translation possible. Participants were a small Who’s Who of leaders in developmental science, behavioral neuroscience, and cognitive science. Several new cross-disciplinary collaborations resulted from it, and it is a testament to the value of what came out of the meeting that Oxford University Press tried to acquire the rights to re-issue the book of the meeting’s proceedings 10 years later—The Development and Neural Basis of Higher Cognitive Functions. (The original printing sold out faster than any other New York Academy of Science Annals issue has before or since.)