Cognitive Science is broadly concerned with integrating contemporary approaches to the study of mind/brain, and with the systems and processes underlying the acquisition and use of knowledge. Given the inherently interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science, our Ph.D. program is structured to allow students the flexibility to pursue a wide variety of research topics and to integrate methodologies and perspectives from different disciplines.
The coherence of the program lies in its intellectual focus on cognition. This program spans cellular, behavioral and psychological levels of scientific analysis in the study of cognition in a single unified graduate program. The program integrates the diverse content, methods, and perspectives of a number of different disciplines (e.g. anthropology, biology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology) which are concerned with or in some sense inform our understanding of cognition, but all of which as individual disciplines involve concerns that are not specifically cognitive.