Cognitive Science

Website: www.philosophy.utah.edu

215 S. Central Campus Drive
CTIHB, Room 402
Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Phone: (801) 581-8161

Fax: (801) 585- 5195

For Information about declaring the Cognitive Science Minor, please contact Connie Corbett at mailto:c.corbett@utah.edu. For questions regarding course substitutions within the minor, please contact Dustin Stokes at dustin.stokes@utah.edu

Ever since we could ponder, humans have inquired about the mind. How does the mind work? What kind of a thing is a mind? How do our thoughts tell us about the world around us? Are these thoughts accurate? These questions have been asked for thousands of years. With twentieth century developments in mathematics, logic, computing, and attempts to build artificial intelligence, theorists from a variety of scientific and theoretical fields began to develop an intriguing thesis: The mind is a kind of computer. Most simply, when new information comes in to the mind, that information is processed according to a set of rules and by drawing upon relevant information from stored memory, all to deliver some kind of output, for example a decision or an action. These were the basics of early modern computing, and applying them to the study of mind has proved a fruitful and exciting research agenda. Today"s cognitive scientists don"t all commit to the thesis that the mind is a computer. But they do all commit to the same pursuit as early human thinkers, namely, figuring out how the mind works. Cognitive science today is a richly interdisciplinary pursuit of knowledge, involving anthropologists, computer scientists, engineers, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, roboticists, and others. As a cognitive science minor, you will have the opportunity to engage this exciting new field, taking a variety of courses from each of the contributing disciplines. And because this research is so young, not only will you learn the latest developments, you will have the rare opportunity to contribute to those developments!

https://advising.utah.edu/majors/quick-look/cognitive-science.php