Cognitive Science

The Designated Emphasis (DE) in Cognitive Science trains students who are already enrolled in a PhD program at UC Berkeley  in the breadth of interdisciplinary approaches to the science of the mind as well as in computational thinking. The DE is available to students already enrolled in any PhD program at UC Berkeley, as a supplement to their primary program of study.

Cognitive Science is characterized by a focus on classic foundational questions about the mind, for example: What aspects of knowledge are innate? What aspects of thought are uniquely human? Is human thought rational? And it pursues these unifying core questions through methods drawn from a variety of disciplines, most commonly psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, anthropology, and philosophy.

Within this overall picture, there is one aspect of cognitive science that is theoretically central: computation. Computation serves both as a model of the mind, and as a set of precise tools for investigating it. Cognitive science thus represents an engagement with fundamental questions of the mind that is computationally oriented but is focused on human rather than artificial intelligence. In today’s environment, cognitive science has the potential to prepare students and citizens for a world in which the intersection of minds, machines, data, and inference is increasingly important, yet in which the centrality of the human mind to that intersection is sometimes obscured, or treated only superficially. Computational principles also serve as a shared lingua franca that allows psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and others to communicate with each other.

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