Cognitive and Computational Sciences

Do you want to study the conceptual and neural systems underlying human perception and cognition?

Graduate Students in the Cognitive and Computational Sciences (CCS) concentration seek to understand the processes that underlie human perception, learning, memory, emotion, conceptual representation, and language.

Comprehending a system as complex as the human mind requires the integration of different levels of analysis. To this end, students in the CCS concentration learn the concepts and theories behind the science of human cognition, and the techniques that can be used to study it from cognitive science, neuroscience, neuropsychology, and computer science.

Research

Research in the CCS concentration is highly collaborative. Core members in the CCS concentration work with one another as well as with researchers from the other concentrations, and many other departments and research centers, including:

• Department of Computer Science
• Program in Linguistics
• Department of Neurology
• Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
• The Emory Eye Center
• The Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience (FERN)
• The Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture (CMBC)

Such collaborations have led to projects involving memory enhancement using direct amygdala stimulation, digital phenotyping of mental illness and the language network, the neural basis of conceptual integration of concepts, and neural connectivity analyses in face and place networks.

A New Kind of Cognitive Scientist

Time-tested methods from cognitive psychology in combination with techniques from data science are giving rise to a new kind of cognitive scientist: one capable of linking the mental processes governing everyday activities to neural processes in the brain.

Such researchers are able to collect and analyze vast amounts of data with cutting-edge techniques from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning.