Cognitive Science

The major in Cognitive Science is designed to prepare students to ask and answer questions about the nature of the mind from a variety of approaches. To this end, the major is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on perspectives and methodological techniques from computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines.

Students successfully completing the major will be able to critically examine theories and empirical findings that address aspects of human cognition at the level of brains, behavior, and computation.

Major Requirements Research Opportunities

Faculty Highlights

Lowder publishes on memory retrieval and language processing

Matthew Lowder, associate professor of psychology, along with Gwynna Ryan '21, published "Retrieval Interference in the Processing of Relative Clauses: Evidence from the Visual-World Paradigm" in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

Lowder publishes first Korean dominance norms to understand lexical ambiguity processing

Matthew Lowder, associate professor of psychology, published "Dominance Norms for 274 Korean Homonyms" in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

Robbins and student publish on webcam photo dataset that enables distance estimation

Arryn Robbins, assistant professor of psychology, along with Yixuan Zhai, ’26, published “Face2Cam: A user-to-webcam distance estimation image dataset” in the Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (Volume 3).

Hartvigsen, Lambert, Harding, and students publish on how positive emotions may boost mental resilience

Kitty Hartvigsen, Trawick Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology, Kelly Lambert, professor of behavioral neuroscience and MacEldin Trawick Professor in Psychology, and Olivia Harding, psychology manager of labs, along with Megan Hooper, '23, Evelyn Barringer, '24, Isabel DiLandro, '25, Aditya Narayanan, '25, Brendan Crockett, '23, Yulia Shatalov, '25, Isabella Tome, '25, Paean Luby, '25, and Braden Wixted, '25, published "A rodent model of enhanced anticipation of positive events: sex-specific modifications in cognitive bias and emotional resilience" in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.