RIT's Cognitive Science Ph.D. provides an interdisciplinary study of the human mind that combines insights from psychology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, augmented reality, and philosophy. Students in the Ph.D. in cognitive science conduct research on human perception, cognition, action, and language with a focus on the representation and processing of information within biological and computational frameworks.

Cognitive Science Research

Ph.D. in cognitive science faculty, all sharing a passion for understanding the biological and computational foundations of human cognition -including memory, perception, attention, language, learning, decision-making, creativity, and problem solving. While faculty research interests are broad, our program emphasizes:

Context, culture, and cognition: Whilst the existence of cognitive universals is likely given the high degree of genetic overlap across animal species, there are significant variations in environments that are likely to lead to individual differences in cognition. Understanding how context and culture drive this variability can both improve our understanding of human cognition and lead to a more inclusive cognitive science.

Biologically-inspired computational models: Computational models provide insights into the mechanisms of cognition and how information is represented and processed in cognitive systems. Biologically-inspired models not only help us constrain our cognitive theories, they also allow us to apply the insights of cognitive science to the development of innovative and powerful computational tools.

Cognition and human action: Cognition cannot be separated from action. The purpose of cognition is to allow us to navigate the world around us in both goal-driven and stimulus-responsive ways. Therefore it is important to explain how cognition is realized in human behavior, and the role of cognition in guiding human action.