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Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science at Fresno State

WELCOME!

Director's Message:

Cognitive Science is an emerging field that brings together various approaches to the study of human cognition, drawing from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy and computer science. Historically, study in Cognitive Science has been conducted within these traditional disciplines and such study still represents important areas of research, as in cognitive psychology within psychology or artificial intelligence within computer science. However, increasingly many researchers and practitioners are feeling a need for a background that integrates basic knowledge in the foundational disciplines and prepares them to work across academic fields.

The Cognitive Science major and minor at Fresno State are broad-based multi-disciplinary programs that are designed to respond to this need. Fresno State's Cognitive Science program builds on a wide range of resources - faculty, courses, facilities - that are distributed across the University. Our associated faculty are active in multiple research areas and are eager to incorporate hand's-on, rich and productive research work into the undergraduate experience. The major is intended as a complement rather than a substitute to traditional disciplinary degrees. For the most part, the degree is built on courses that provide core knowledge of the foundational disciplines. These courses generally include the core courses for the respective departmental programs. However, Cognitive Science majors are also expected to gain specialized knowledge beyond the basic introductory work. The core courses include statistics and research methods in psychology, advanced programming techniques in computer science, computational linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.

We invite you to read over the materials presented here and to contact the Cognitive Science Director with any questions you may have.

Disciplines