About the Program

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Cognitive Science is the cross-disciplinary study of the structure and processes of human cognition and their computational simulation or modeling. This interdisciplinary program is designed to give students an understanding of questions dealing with human cognition, such as concept formation, visual perception, the acquisition and processing of natural language, and human reasoning and problem solving.

The program draws on relevant courses found within the fields of anthropology, biology, computer science, education, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, as well as specially designed lower and upper division courses in cognitive science. 

Declaring the Major

For prerequisites required before declaring the major, please see the Major Requirements tab. Students interested in the major should consult http://cogsci.berkeley.edu and then schedule an appointment with the student academic adviser.  The Cognitive Science office is located in 140 Stephens Hall.

Honors Program

Cognitive Science majors who wish to graduate with honors must have an overall GPA of 3.30 or higher in all work completed at the University and a 3.30 GPA or higher in the major program at the time of graduation. In addition, they must complete a thesis of high quality, based upon independent study with a member of the Cognitive Science faculty and marked by satisfactory completion of at least three units in any of the following courses: COG SCI H195A, COG SCI H195B, or COG SCI 199.  Please visit the Cognitive Science Honors webpage for more information.

Minor Program

There is no minor program in Cognitive Science.

Visit Program Website

Major Requirements

Lower Division Requirements

Upper Division Distribution Requirements

Select one course from each of the following six areas. Courses that are listed within more than one area of concentration can be counted toward only one requirement.

College Requirements

Undergraduate students in the College of Letters & Science must fulfill the following requirements in addition to those required by their major program.

For detailed lists of courses that fulfill college requirements, please review the College of Letters & Sciences page in this Guide.

Entry Level Writing

All students who will enter the University of California as freshmen must demonstrate their command of the English language by fulfilling the Entry Level Writing requirement. Fulfillment of this requirement is also a prerequisite to enrollment in all reading and composition courses at UC Berkeley. 

American History and American Institutions

The American History and Institutions requirements are based on the principle that a US resident graduated from an American university, should have an understanding of the history and governmental institutions of the United States.

American Cultures

American Cultures is the one requirement that all undergraduate students at Cal need to take and pass in order to graduate. The requirement offers an exciting intellectual environment centered on the study of race, ethnicity and culture of the United States. AC courses offer students opportunities to be part of research-led, highly accomplished teaching environments, grappling with the complexity of American Culture.

Quantitative Reasoning

The Quantitative Reasoning requirement is designed to ensure that students graduate with basic understanding and competency in math, statistics, or computer science. The requirement may be satisfied by exam or by taking an approved course.

Foreign Language

The Foreign Language requirement may be satisfied by demonstrating proficiency in reading comprehension, writing, and conversation in a foreign language equivalent to the second semester college level, either by passing an exam or by completing approved course work.

Reading and Composition

In order to provide a solid foundation in reading, writing, and critical thinking the College requires two semesters of lower division work in composition in sequence. Students must complete a first-level reading and composition course by the end of their second semester and a second-level course by the end of their fourth semester.

Breadth Requirements

The undergraduate breadth requirements provide Berkeley students with a rich and varied educational experience outside of their major program. As the foundation of a liberal arts education, breadth courses give students a view into the intellectual life of the University while introducing them to a multitude of perspectives and approaches to research and scholarship. Engaging students in new disciplines and with peers from other majors, the breadth experience strengthens interdisciplinary connections and context that prepares Berkeley graduates to understand and solve the complex issues of their day.

Unit Requirements

• 120 total units, including at least 60 L&S units

• Of the 120 units, 36 must be upper division units

• Of the 36 upper division units, 6 must be taken in courses offered outside your major department

Residence Requirements

For units to be considered in "residence," you must be registered in courses on the Berkeley campus as a student in the College of Letters & Science. Most students automatically fulfill the residence requirement by attending classes here for four years. In general, there is no need to be concerned about this requirement, unless you go abroad for a semester or year or want to take courses at another institution or through UC Extension during your senior year. In these cases, you should make an appointment to meet an adviser to determine how you can meet the Senior Residence Requirement.

Note: Courses taken through UC Extension do not count toward residence.

Senior Residence Requirement

After you become a senior (with 90 semester units earned toward your BA degree), you must complete at least 24 of the remaining 30 units in residence in at least two semesters. To count as residence, a semester must consist of at least 6 passed units. Intercampus Visitor, EAP, and UC Berkeley-Washington Program (UCDC) units are excluded.

You may use a Berkeley Summer Session to satisfy one semester of the Senior Residence requirement, provided that you successfully complete 6 units of course work in the Summer Session and that you have been enrolled previously in the college.

Modified Senior Residence Requirement

Participants in the UC Education Abroad Program (EAP) or the UC Berkeley Washington Program (UCDC) may meet a Modified Senior Residence requirement by completing 24 (excluding EAP) of their final 60 semester units in residence. At least 12 of these 24 units must be completed after you have completed 90 units.

Upper Division Residence Requirement

You must complete in residence a minimum of 18 units of upper division courses (excluding EAP units), 12 of which must satisfy the requirements for your major.

Student Learning Goals

Mission

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that is concerned with the acquisition, representation, and use of knowledge by individual minds, brains, and machines, as well as groups, institutions, and other social entities. Because the fundamental purpose of the University, as a social institution, is the preservation, generation, and transmission of knowledge, cognitive science speaks to the heart of the University's mission. By engaging faculty from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, and anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences in common purpose, cognitive science constitutes a microcosm of the University as a whole. Berkeley's Cognitive Science Program is almost unique in terms of the scope of our approach to the field.

Cognitive Science major students are expected to approach problems of knowledge using the tools of several different disciplines: philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, and various social sciences. This expectation is reflected in a demanding curriculum that moves from a broad introductory survey course (COG SCI 1), to a six-course distribution requirement covering the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computational modeling and artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and various social sciences. After fulfilling their distribution requirement, students have the opportunity to concentrate further study in one of these six fields, and to complete an honors thesis.

Learning Goals for the Major

By the end of their undergraduate careers, cognitive science majors are expected to understand and critically evaluate:

1. Research and theory in cognitive psychology, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, judgment, and decision-making.
2. Research and theory in linguistics, with special attention to the relation between language and thought.
3. Various approaches to artificial intelligence, and the computational modeling of cognitive processes.
4. The biological bases of cognitive functions, as uncovered by cognitive neuroscience.
5. Classic and contemporary work on the philosophy of mind, including the mind-body problem, mental causation, freedom of the will, and the nature of consciousness.
6. The sociocultural context of individual cognition, including the social construction and organization of knowledge, cultural differences in cognition, the history of information, etc.

Skills

We also expect that students will have acquired the following skills for lifelong learning and effective citizenship:

1. Formulating a well-organized argument supported by evidence.
2. Effectively written, spoken, and graphical communication.
3. Problem-solving in cognitive science and its constituent fields.
4. Applying critical thinking skills in new and complex situations.
5. Using probability and statistics in reasoning.
6. Understanding the social implications of theory and research in cognitive science for responsible professional, civic, and ethical behavior.

Academic Opportunities

Graduate Study

Courses

Cognitive Science

Faculty and Instructors

+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Faculty

Dor Abrahamson, Associate Professor. Mathematical cognition, design-based research, mixed-media design for mathematics learning environments, embodied interaction.
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Martin S. Banks, Professor. Stereopsis, virtual reality, optometry, multisensory interactions, self-motion perception, vision, depth perception, displays, picture perception, visual ergonomics.
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Sonia Bishop, Assistant Professor.

Roy L. Caldwell, Professor. Ecology, evolution, Invertebrates, animal behavior, behavioral ecology, marine biology, stomatopods, crustaceans, cephalopods, octopus, mating systems, communication, sensory ecology, aggressive behavior, coral reef restoration.
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John Joseph Campbell, Professor. Theory of meaning; philosophy of mind; causation in psychology.
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Jose M. Carmena, Professor. Brain-machine interfaces, neural ensemble computation, neuroprosthetics, sensorimotor learning and control.
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Melinda Chen, Associate Professor.

Clayton Critcher, Assistant Professor. Judgment and decision making, consumer experience, the self, moral psychology, social cognition.
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Mark T. D'Esposito, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, psychology, working memory, frontal lobe function, functional MRI, neurology, brain imaging, dopamine.
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Terrence W. Deacon, Professor. Neuroscience, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, semiotics, primates, linguistic theory.
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Michael Deweese, Assistant Professor. Machine learning, computation, systems neuroscience, auditory cortex, neural coding.
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Susanne Gahl, Associate Professor. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic structure, language production, aphasia and related language disorders.
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Robert J. Glushko, Adjunct Professor.

Alison Gopnik, Professor. Learning, philosophy, psychology, cognitive development, theory of mind, young children, children's causal knowledge, Bayes Net formalism.
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Tom Griffiths, Associate Professor. Machine learning, computational models of human cognition, Bayesian statistics, cultural evolution.
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William F. Hanks, Professor. Social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, shamanism, language, Yucatan Mexico, Maya culture.
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Rich Ivry, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, behavior, cognition, brain, attention, coordination, psychology, motor and perceptual processes in normal and neurologically impaired populations, temporal processing, executive control.
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Lucia F. Jacobs, Professor. Cognitive and brain evolution, adaptive patterns in spatial memory, spatial navigation, cognitive sex differences and decision making.
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John F. Kihlstrom, Professor. Personality, behavior, memory, psychology, cognition in personal, social contexts, unconscious mental processes, hypnosis, social cognition, experimental psychopathology, health cognition, unconscious mental life.
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Daniel Klein, Professor. Artificial Intelligence (AI); Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning.
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Robert Thomas Knight, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, language, physiology, memory, attention, psychology, working memory, neuropsychology, human prefrontal cortex, neural mechanisms of cognitive processing, sensory gating, sustained attention, ad novelty detection.
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Paul Li, Adjunct Professor.

Tania Lombrozo, Associate Professor.

Jitendra Malik, Professor. Artificial Intelligence (AI); Biosystems & Computational Biology (BIO); Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics (CIR); Graphics (GR); Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Signal Processing (SP);.
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Sam A. Mchombo, Associate Professor. African languages, linguistics, political development, sports and politics, national identity, globalization.

Srini NarayananArtificial intelligence, cognitive science, socially relevant computing, web semantics, cognitive and neural computation, learning and control in complex systems.

Alva Noe, Professor. Cognitive science, phenomenology, consciousness, philosophy, theory of perception, theory of art, Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy origins.
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Bruno Olshausen, Professor. Visual perception, computational neuroscience, computational vision.
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Michael Andrew Ranney, Professor. Reasoning, learning, cognitive science and society.
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Terry Regier, Professor. Computational methods, language and thought, semantic universals.
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Richard Rhodes, Associate Professor. American Indian languages, lexical semantics, lexicography, Algonquian languages, Ojibwe, Mixe-Zoquean languages, mixed languages, Michif, Sayula Popoluca.
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Stuart Russell, Professor. Artificial intelligence, computational biology, algorithms, machine learning, real-time decision-making, probabilistic reasoning.
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Geoffrey B. Saxe, Professor. U.S., developmental psychology, interplay between culture and cognitive development, mathematical cognition in children, Papua New Guinea, urban and rural areas of Northeastern Brazil, elementary school classrooms, cognitive development, mathematics education.
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Alan H. Schoenfeld, Professor. Thinking, teaching, learning, productive learning environments, mathematics education, modeling the process of teaching, understanding how and why teachers do what they do.
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+ John R. Searle, Professor . Philosophy, problems of mind and language.
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Arthur P. Shimamura, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, behavior, cognition, brain, psychology, frontal lobe function, basic memory research.
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Mahesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor.

Eve E. Sweetser, Professor. Subjectivity, syntax, semantics, cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, Celtic languages, speech act theory, semantic change, grammaticalization, gesture, metaphor, iconicity, viewpoint, construction grammar, semantics of grammatical constructions.

David Whitney, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, cognition, attention, visual perception, vision, visually guided action.
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Fei Xu, Professor. Conceptual development, developmental psychology, cognitive development, language development, social cognition in infants and children, learning in infants and young children, statistical learning and statistical inference, psychology and philosophy, computational models of cognitive development.
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Lecturers

David E. Presti, Senior Lecturer SOE.

Emeritus Faculty

Andrea A. diSessa, Professor Emeritus. Physics and computation cognition.
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Susan M. Ervin-Tripp, Professor Emeritus. Sociolinguistics, psychologist, pragmatics, child language, bilingualism.
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Jerome A. Feldman, Professor Emeritus. Artificial Intelligence (AI); Biosystems & Computational Biology (BIO); Security (SEC); cognitive science.
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Charles Fillmore, Professor Emeritus.

Ervin R. Hafter, Professor Emeritus.

Paul Kay, Professor Emeritus. Linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, syntax, semantics, lexicon, grammar, color naming, lexical semantics, grammatical variation, cross-language color naming, the encoding of contextual relations in rules of grammar.
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George P. Lakoff, Professor Emeritus. Mathematics, literature, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, the neural theory of language, conceptual systems, conceptual metaphor, syntax-semantics-pragmatics, the application of cognitive linguistics to politics.
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John J. Ohala, Professor Emeritus. Linguistics, experimental phonology, phonetics, historical phonology, ethological aspects of communication, speech technology, automatic recognition of speech, diverse behavioral phenomena.
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Stephen E. Palmer, Professor Emeritus. Psychology, visual perception, visual processing.
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Kaiping Peng, Professor Emeritus. Psychology, East Asian studies, social cultural sychology, reasoning and judgment across cultures and domains, inter-ethnic, racial relations, cross-cultural communication and understanding.
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William Prinzmetal, Adjunct Professor Emeritus. Behavior, cognition, brain, attention, psychology, visual perception.
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Lynn C. Robertson, Professor Emeritus. Cognitive neuroscience, attention, psychology, representations of objects and space, visual search, binding mechanisms, perceptual organization in normal and neurological populations, functional hemisphere asymmetries, spatial deficits.
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Eleanor Rosch, Professor Emeritus. Cognition, psychology, concepts, Eastern psychologies, psychologies of religion, cross cultural, causality.
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Dan I. Slobin, Professor Emeritus. Sociolinguistics, behavior, cognition, brain, psycholinguistics, psychology, language and cognitive development, sign language, cross-cultural.
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Lotfi A. Zadeh, Professor Emeritus. Artificial intelligence, linguistics, control theory, logic, fuzzy sets, decision analysis, expert systems neural networks, soft computing, computing with words, computational theory of perceptions and precisiated natural language.
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