Cognitive and Information Sciences, Ph.D.

Contact: Mitch Ylarregui, Graduate Program Coordinator
mylarregui@ucmerced.edu

The Cognitive and Information Sciences Ph.D. program offers its students interdisciplinary training in cognitive science with an emphasis on computation, technology and applications. This emphasis distinguishes us from other Cognitive Science graduate programs. We view intelligent behaviors not just as emerging solely from neural processes, but from interactions between brain, body, and environment. Thus intelligent behaviors may also emerge from group and social interactions situated in their economic and technological milieu. The word “information” in CIS denotes our multi-scale perspective on cognition, and our emphases on computational approaches and applications towards developing technologies that foster, and even aspire to emulate, intelligent behavior.

Our award-winning faculty specialize in a variety of areas that intersect at this nexus, including computational modeling, complex systems theory, distributed cognition, categorization, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, visual perception, cognitive engineering, service science, artificial intelligence, reasoning, computer vision, philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience, and bioinformatics. With computational, technological, and application oriented skills in these areas, students who graduate from this Ph.D. program will have career opportunities in both academia and industry.