About Cognitive Science

For centuries, philosophers and scientists of many stripes have sought to understand the relationship between the brain and mind, sometimes described as the hardest problem in science. How is it that the human brain, three pounds of matter, supports so many faculties that distinguish our species from all other life forms: consciousness, language, science, mathematics, morality, music, art, and more? We need good theories of the brain, the mind, and of the link between them, the mind/brain.

On the brain side, neuroscience includes measuring and modeling the living brain. Researchers map how information is represented and transformed across neural circuits, how those circuits change with experience, and how their disruption leads to disorder. Computational neuroscience ties these measurements together with models that capture circuit dynamics and make testable predictions, providing the biological grounding that complements cognitive science’s theories of the mind.

On the mind side, cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind and deals with the nature of perception, motor organization, memory, language, thinking, consciousness, and learning and development. It investigates these topics from a number of methodological perspectives, including behavioral evidence for how these systems operate and formal, symbolic, and biological evidence on the computational and neural machinery that underlies them.

Research on these topics comes centrally from several traditionally distinct fields: experimental psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience. Other relevant disciplines—biology, anthropology, economics, decision sciences, and education—are also part of this burgeoning field.

The Cognitive Science Society was formed in 1979, just after the Society for Neuroscience. In recent years, the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences have grown in stature and prominence, both in the US and around the world. There is a renamed section of the National Academy of Sciences and a new National Research Council Board that cover these areas; virtually all major research universities offer graduate and postdoctoral programs in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, with variation in the character of the programs depending on the interdisciplinary strengths of each university.

The recent rise of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) has further highlighted the central role of cognitive science in understanding, modeling, and attempting to replicate aspects of human cognition—topics that students in the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, also known as the CogSci minor, actively explore and grapple with through coursework and research. The two core courses of the minor, together with its distribution requirements , ensure that students engage in interdisciplinary conversations and investigations, drawing on perspectives from neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and beyond.