Exploration of some or all of these questions has been and is being undertaken in such disciplines as cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, robotics, neuroscience, education, social cognition, cognitive anthropology, behavioral economics, and others. The major and the minor in Cognitive Science therefore represent a formal means of bringing together students and faculty in different disciplines who share common interests.

Cognitive Science is the science of the mind. Drawing on the fields of philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, Cognitive Science studies the nature of consciousness, the interaction of mind and matter, and the relationship between thought and language. Cognitive Science addresses long-standing questions about the nature of thought, intelligence, perception, memory, emotion, and other aspects of our mental life by employing the methodologies of the contributing disciplines mentioned above, including philosophical reflection and argument, experimental psychology, the modeling of intelligence with machines, and the investigation of the biological basis of cognition.

Cognitive science is concerned with how humans, animals, and computers acquire, represent, manipulate, and use information. As an interdisciplinary field it combines research and theory from three central disciplines (computer science, cognitive psychology, and philosophy), two closely related disciplines (linguistics and neuroscience), and several more distantly related disciplines (e.g., biology, math, and anthropology).

Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary field of research about the nature of cognition (thinking). Cognitive science involves many levels of examination, from theoretical models of the structure of cognitive processes, to basic neuroscience, to measures of behavior from which we infer cognitive structures and processes, to computer modeling of these processes. Unifying the field is the importance of abstract thinking (as mental processes are unobservable) and an understanding of philosophical issues related to the study of mental processes, action, and perceptual experience.

The major is designed to familiarize students with methodologies for studying the mind drawn from the core cognitive science disciplines and applied to central issues in cognitive science. For example, how do we interpret sensory experience? How is memory organized in the mind and brain? How do we remember and why do we forget? How are components of language (sound, meaning, syntax) represented in the mind and brain and how do they interact? What does consciousness add to cognition and what cognitive processes are nonconscious?

Cognitive Science is the cross-disciplinary study of how the mind works, with a focus on perception, reasoning, memory, attention, language, decision-making, motor control, and problem solving. Cognitive scientists often compare minds to computers. In particular, they describe mental processes as computational operations on internal representations. For instance, perception is seen as a representation of the external world that results from sensory stimulation; learning is analyzed as the addition of new representations through interactions with the environment; reasoning is treated as the addition of new representations through operations on existing representations.

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field that studies the fundamental workings of cognition and the mind. It investigates perception, action, language, knowledge, development, and thinking from multiple perspectives—theoretical, experimental, and computational—with the aim of gaining a better understanding of human cognition and the nature of intelligent systems. The nature of mental representations and their acquisition and use are important themes, as are the comparison between human and artificial intelligence, and the relation between human cognition and its biological foundations.