Overview

Historically, study in Cognitive Science has been conducted within these traditional disciplines and such study still represents important areas of research, as in cognitive psychology within psychology or artificial intelligence within computer science. However, increasingly many researchers and practitioners are feeling a need for a background that integrates basic knowledge in the foundational disciplines and prepares them to work across academic fields.

The Cognitive Science major and minor at California State University, Fresno are broad-based multi-disciplinary programs that are designed to respond to this need. Fresno State's Cognitive Science program builds on a wide range of resources - faculty, courses, facilities - that are distributed across the University. Our associated faculty are active in multiple research areas and are eager to incorporate hand's-on, rich and productive research work into the undergraduate experience. The major is intended as a complement rather than a substitute to traditional disciplinary degrees. For the most part, the degree is built on courses that provide core knowledge of the foundational disciplines. These courses generally include the core courses for the respective departmental programs. However, Cognitive Science majors are also expected to gain specialized knowledge beyond the basic introductory work. The core courses include statistics and research methods in psychology, advanced programming techniques in computer science, computational linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.

What You Can Learn

• Problem-solving strategies, algorithm design, and data abstraction

• Principles of operation of the human memory system

• Sensory and perceptual processes in vision, touch and hearing

• Integration of quantitative and expert knowledge with the computer for improving the decision-making process