Cognitive Science: An Introduction, 2nd Edition

This old book is a great introduction to all of the fields that make up cognitive science at a relatively low price, although it could use an updated edition. It takes a computational perspective as it surveys the various areas, and that is good for someone coming from a scientific field. It covers psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, relating them all to the field of cognitive science. In spite of the complexity of each of these individual areas, there really are no hard prerequisites for reading it. However, I would recommend you have at least an upper-level undergraduate knowledge of two of the fields covered in order to better see the total interconnection of all the fields. The book probably goes into the most depth in the areas of natural language processing and vision because these are the most computationally complex. This book is not the last word on any of the fields it covers, but it will get you started.