Overview
The Cognitive Science Program at UC Berkeley offers undergraduates the opportunity to explore the mind from an interdisciplinary perspective. Courses in the program draw on psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, among other fields, to illuminate how the human mind works and why it works the way it does.
Many influential ideas within cognitive science originated at Berkeley. The program draws on over 40 affiliated faculty from a variety of departments and is closely integrated with cognitive science research efforts across the campus.
The cognitive science research community at Berkeley is centered around the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Students interested in cognitive science graduate study can receive graduate training in programs in affiliated disciplines, e.g. psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. There is presently no separate graduate program specifically for cognitive science.
Undergraduate Program
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.
Research Profile
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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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.
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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