This special issue includes revised versions of papers presented at the IUPsyS Symposium "Psychology and Cognitive Science", held during the XXVIth International Congress of Psychology in Montreal, August 1996. The introductory article reports the results of an international survey conducted for the IUPsyS on the place and role of psychology in cognitive science; the next three papers are illustrations of interdisciplinary approaches to cognitive issues. Approaches to discourse comprehension by cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and neurobiology are discussed, and it is considered how the human mind and machines represent knowledge from discourse and text. Finally, there is a description of a computational approach to vision and language inspired by psychological theories.