Cognitive Debugging

Cognitive Debugging relies on cognitive science since application debugging is a critical and complex activity not at source code level only but especially at binary auditing. Accurate and fast debugging leads to improved flaw finding or malware understanding - just as an example. Debugging involves a very demanding cognitive process.

A full cognitive debuggee uses all six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning (more on this with one of the next posts). This ranges from “knowledge” through “comprehension”, “application”, “analysis”, “synthesis”, and “evaluation”. The process of using higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, such as synthesis and evaluation, indicates that program debugging - especially binary auditing - is a difficult cognitive task.

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and biology. More than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.

The term cognitive science was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report. Cognitive science has unifying theoretical ideas, but we have to appreciate the diversity of outlooks and methods that researchers in different fields bring to the study of mind and intelligence. The central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures.

Most work in cognitive science assumes that the mind has mental representations analogous to computer data structures, and computational procedures similar to computational algorithms. Cognitive theorists have proposed that the mind contains such mental representations as logical propositions, rules, concepts, images, and analogies, and that it uses mental procedures such as deduction, search, matching, rotating, and retrieval.

Some philosophy, in particular naturalistic philosophy of mind, is part of cognitive science. But the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science is relevant to philosophy in several ways. First, the psychological, computational, and other results of cognitive science investigations have important potential applications to traditional philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Second, cognitive science can serve as an object of philosophical critique, particularly concerning the central assumption that thinking is representational and computational. Third and more constructively, cognitive science can be taken as an object of investigation in the philosophy of science, generating reflections on the methodology and presuppositions of the enterprise.

We found that this is one fact that explains the significant difference between novices / experts and especially between their debugging effectiveness.