The Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona was established in 1986. Cognitive Science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind, encompasses the study of intelligent behavior as well as the brain mechanisms and computations underlying that behavior. The field is at the intersection of several other disciplines, including philosophy (knowledge representation, logic), psychology (basic human cognition, perception and performance), computer science (computational theory, artificial intelligence and robotics), linguistics (theories of language structure) and cognitive neuroscience (brain mechanisms for intelligent behavior), and anthropology (animal behavior and cross-cultural cognition). It is a model interdisciplinary program. Typical research areas of cognitive science include judgment and decision making, language comprehension and production, language acquisition, visual recognition of objects and events, attention, learning and memory, goal directed movement in complex environments and consciousness.
For the Cognitive Science minor, students usually enroll in the Ph.D. program of a cooperating discipline; the minor is then designed in consultation with Cognitive Science Program faculty. The Program has special strength in knowledge structure, natural language processing, and cognitive neuroscience.
The program has more than 67 faculty from 7 colleges and 21 departments and the following University-wide units participate in the Program: the Center for Complex Systems Study, the Cognitive Neuroscience Center, the Institute for Neurogenic Communicative Disorders, and the Neural Systems, Memory and Aging Center.