These discussions are opportunities to meet people who are interested in cognitive science and to playfully and respectfully discuss cognitive science ideas, research, applications, career options and news. The purpose of these discussions is to learn cognitive science, facilitate personal growth, cultivate friendship and community, and to have some fun.

You can find dates for upcoming discussions and RSVP on our meetup group.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of minds. Cognitive scientists attempt to integrate knowledge from several disciplines and several levels of analysis. Most ideas have historically come from philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. Cognitive science includes more than just cognition, i.e. knowledge, beliefs, language, thinking, reasoning, decision-making and problem solving. It also includes the study of sensation, perception, movement, emotions, attitudes, consciousness, psychopathology, social interactions, and culture.

References:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Cognitive Science 

Wikipedia - Cognitive science

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science

Understanding minds can help to predict and influence the minds and behavior of people and animals. Understanding minds can also help to create artificial minds. Good reasons to study cognitive science include wanting to learn

• how to improve our own minds, 

• how to help others improve their minds, 

• how to better predict our own and other people’s thoughts and behaviors,

• how to better influence our own and other people’s thoughts and behaviors, and

• how to build better artificial minds.

Here are a couple of helpful introductory courses on cognitive science available on YouTube:

• Cummins - Introduction to Cognitive Science for Undergraduates

• Rhodes - Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Introduction

There are many talks on YouTube that can give relatively quick introductions to typical work in cognitive science. These include:

• Levin - A conversation with Mark Solms on life and mind

• Panksepp – Notre Dame Symposium on Human Nature and Early Experience

• Fins, Nicolelis, Prat, Stocoo, Yoo, & Donvan - Mind Melds and Brain Beams: The Dawn of Brain-to-Brain Communication

• Thagard & Eliasmith - Minds in Machines: Comparing Biological and Synthetic Intelligence 

• Stephen Grossberg: The Brains Cognitive Dynamics

• Tenenbaum - Building machines that see, learn, and think like people

• Tenenbaum - What Kind of Computation Is Cognition?

• Sapolsky - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

• Bach - From Computation to Consciousness

• Pinker - Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

• Hofstadter - Analogy as the Core of Cognition

• Dennett - From Bacteria to Bach and Back

• Frith & Frith - The Science of Collaboration 

• Seth - The Neuroscience of Consciousness

There are many excellent cognitive science talks hosted on YouTube by the following research institutes:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Brains Minds and Machines

• Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute

• Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

• Waterloo Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience

A few good podcasts include:

• Brain Inspired

• RSam Podcast

Some good cognitive science related books for general audiences include:

• Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid. Basic books. 

• Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Summit Books. 

• Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. Norton.

• Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin Books.

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan. 

• Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin.

• Mitchell, M. (2019). Artificial intelligence: A guide for thinking humans. Penguin UK.

Several good textbooks have been written that introduce cognitive science.  These include:

• Bermúdez, J. L. (2022). Cognitive science: An introduction to the science of the mind. Cambridge University Press.

• Friedenberg, J., Silverman, G., & Spivey, M. J. (2021). Cognitive science: an introduction to the study of mind. Sage Publications.

• Butz, M. V., & Kutter, E. F. (2017). How the mind comes into being: Introducing cognitive science from a functional and computational perspective. Oxford University Press.

• Sobel, C. P., & Li, P. (2015). The cognitive sciences: An interdisciplinary approach. Sage Publications. 

• Edelman, S. (2008). Computing the mind: How the mind really works. Oxford University Press.

• Thagard, P. (2005). Mind: Introduction to cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

• Harré, R. (2002). Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction. Sage.

The following are textbooks that should be useful for a beginner trying to learn methods used by cognitive scientists. The variety is due to the variety of backgrounds and the variety of methodological inclinations of different cognitive scientists. People usually choose a subset of methods to master. It pays to choose wisely! Godspeed to those who try to master all of it.

Study Skills, Literature Reviews, Academic Writing, and Project Management:

• Oakley, B. A. (2014). A mind for numbers: How to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra). Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

• Jesson, J., Matheson, L., & Lacey, F. M. (2011). Doing your literature review: Traditional and systematic techniques. SAGE.

• Schimel, J. (2011). Writing science: how to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded. OUP.

• Wingate, L. M. (2014). Project management for research and development: guiding innovation for positive R&D outcomes. Auerbach Publications.

Qualitative Methods:

• Howitt, D. (2019). Introduction to qualitative research methods in psychology: Putting theory into practice. Pearson UK.

Informal logic, meta-philosophy, and philosophy of science:

• Sinnott-Armstrong W., Fogelin, R.,J,. (2013). Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic. Ninth Edition. Cengage.

• Overgaard, S., Gilbert, P., & Burwood, S. (2013). An introduction to metaphilosophy. Cambridge University Press.

• Losee, J. (2001). A historical introduction to the philosophy of science. OUP Oxford.

Scientific theory development and experimental design:

• Jaccard, J., & Jacoby, J. (2020). Theory construction and model-building skills: A practical guide for social scientists. Guilford Publications.

• Cunningham, D. W., & Wallraven, C. (2019). Experimental design: From user studies to psychophysics. AK Peters/CRC Press.

Statistics:

• Tattar, P. N., Ramaiah, S., & Manjunath, B. G. (2016). A Course in Statistics with R. John Wiley & Sons.

• James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., & Tibshirani, R. (2021). An introduction to statistical learning. Second Edition. New York: Springer.

• Kruschke, J. (2014). Doing Bayesian data analysis: A tutorial with R, JAGS, and Stan. Second Edition. Elsevier.

Measurement, Psychometrics, Psychophysics and Neuroimaging:

• Morris, A., Langari, R., (2020). Measurement and Instrumentation: Theory and Application. Third Edition. Academic Press.

• Borsboom, D. (2005). Measuring the mind: Conceptual issues in contemporary psychometrics. Cambridge University Press.

• Mair, P. (2018). Modern psychometrics with R. Springer International Publishing.

• Knoblauch, K., & Maloney, L. T. (2012). Modeling psychophysical data in R. Springer Science & Business Media.

• Newman, A. (2019). Research Methods for Cognitive Neuroscience. SAGE.

Scientific computing and computational modelling:

• Wilensky, U., & Rand, W. (2015). An introduction to agent-based modeling: modeling natural, social, and engineered complex systems with NetLogo. MIT Press.

• Garrido, J. M. (2016). Introduction to Computational Models with Python. Chapman and Hall/CRC.

• Johansson, R. (2019). Numerical Python: Scientific Computing and Data Science Applications with Numpy, SciPy and Matplotlib. Apress.

Mathematics:

• Hein, J. L., (2017). Discrete Structures, Logic, and Computability. Fourth Edition. Jones & Bartlett Learning

• Safier, F. (2019). Schaum's Outline of Precalculus. Fourth Edition. McGraw-Hill Education.

• Ayres F. Jr., Mendelson, E. (2013). Schaum's Outline of Calculus. Sixth Edition. McGraw-Hill.

• Lipschutz, S., & Lipson, M. (2018). Schaum's Outline of Linear Algebra. Sixth Edition. McGraw-Hill.

• Hsu, H. P. (2020). Schaum's Outline of Probability, Random Variables, and Random Processes. Fourth Edition. McGraw-Hill.

• Spiegel, M. R. (2010). Schaum's Outline of Advanced Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists. McGraw Hill Professional.

Engineering:

• Cetinkunt, S. (2015). Mechatronics with experiments. Second Edition. John Wiley & Sons.

This book is a thorough study of the history of cognitive science:

• Margaret A. Boden. (2008). Mind as machine: A history of cognitive science. Oxford University Press. 

The following books are histories of the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence respectively:

• Robinson, D. N. (1995). An intellectual history of psychology. University of Wisconsin Press. 

• Wickens, A. P. (2014). A history of the brain: from stone age surgery to modern neuroscience. Psychology Press. 

• Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2016). A history of modern psychology. Cengage Learning. 

• Nilsson, N. J. (2009). The quest for artificial intelligence. Cambridge University Press.

There are a few research handbooks available that give overviews of general research areas in cognitive science. These include:

• Sun, R. (Ed.). (2023). The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

• Chipman, S. E. (Ed.). (2016). The Oxford handbook of cognitive science. Oxford University Press.

• Frankish, K., & Ramsey, W. (Eds.). (2012). The Cambridge handbook of cognitive science. Cambridge University Press.

• Durso, F. T., Nickerson, R. S., Dumais, S. T., Lewandowsky, S., & Perfect, T. J. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of applied cognition. John Wiley & Sons.

• Thagard, P. (Ed.). (2007). Philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. North-Holland.

There are also many research handbooks that focus on more specific questions or methods relevant for cognitive science.

There are a few general cognitive science journals. These include:

Trends in Cognitive Sciences,

Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, and

Topics in Cognitive Science.

One can also find relevant research in many more focused journals. Scimago Journal & Country Rank is a useful tool for finding high quality scientific journals. You can find cognitive science articles in many of the journals ranked under Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, and Arts and Humanities.

The Cognitive Science Society maintains an international list of university programs in cognitive science.

The Cognitive Science Society is a learned society dedicated to promoting cognitive science as a discipline.

Wikipedia hosts an international list of cognitive science and research institutes.

The Cognitive Science Society organizes an annual conference.