Cognitive science refers to the interdisciplinary study of the acquisition and use of knowledge. It includes as contributing disciplines: artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, and education. The cognitive science movement is far-reaching and diverse, containing within it several viewpoints.
[It is] a synthesis concerned with the kinds of knowledge that underlie human cognition, the details of human cognitive processing, and the computational modelling of those processes. There are five major topic areas in cognitive science: knowledge representation, language, learning, thinking, and perception.
(Source - Eysenck, M.W. ed. (1990). The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Ltd.)