The complexities of the mind and human brain require an equally complex field of study, involving philosophers and linguists connecting with neurobiologists, psychologists and computer scientists. The Cognitive Studies Program at Cornell fills that bill with more than 75 faculty members across these diverse disciplines.

Cognitive studies should really be called cognitive science, says professor of philosophy Tamar Szabo Gendler, cognitive studies program co-director, because it explores the capacities of the mind -- including perception, action, language and thinking -- from many perspectives. The program's core course, Introduction to Cognitive Studies [COGST 101], is cross-listed under the Departments of Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology. Other key disciplines within the program are human development, and neurobiology and behavior, notably with the course Mind, Brain and Behavior.

Gendler insists that cognitive studies is not just a College of Arts and Sciences program, because "we're one of the few interdisciplinary programs with faculty from all over the university -- including human development, the business school, the law school and the medical school." Also included are behavioral finance for economists, as well as design and environmental analysis, communication, education, sociology and mechanical engineering studies.

Last spring faculty members gave informal talks in the series "A Day in the Life," describing their typical workday of teaching or research. Students who work on Logos, the undergraduate philosophy journal at Cornell, are currently helping to compile readings for the second edition of "Philosophy of the 21st Century," a textbook that Gendler is co-editing.

Faculty and graduate students across the university meet weekly to discuss recent articles in psychology, cognition and human development. The discussion group, organized by James Cutting, professor of psychology, is currently reading work by key participants in a Perception and Action Symposium, an international conference bringing philosophers and psychologists to Cornell in May.

Undergraduates concentrating in cognitive studies can choose tracks in perception and cognition (including visual and auditory perception), language and cognition (including linguistic theory and language processing and acquisition), cognition and information processing (in the mind and in computers), or cognitive neuroscience. This fall, the program will offer 12 undergraduate courses, three of them new -- Philosophy and Psychology, Cognitive Social and Developmental Aspects of Scientific Reasoning, and Cognitive Psychology.

The program supports cross-disciplinary collaborations among faculty and graduate students, says program co-director Michael Spivey, professor of psychology. That includes joint research on statistical natural language processing by professor of linguistics Mats Rooth and computer science faculty Claire Cardie and Lillian Lee, as well as a project investigating cognitive processes in figurative language comprehension by Spivey and Jeff Hancock, assistant professor of communication and information science.

"I'm interested in the question of reading and writing and how that parallels our understanding of linguistic sound categories," says professor of linguistics Abigail Cohn. "Those are questions that are hard for me to pursue just within the confines of linguistics. That's what leads me to seek out my colleagues ... to get a much broader picture from a psychological point of view. What is nice about the Cognitive Studies Program is it fosters and supports these kinds of bottom-up collaborations. It's fostered shared use of facilities, and when people have had exciting ideas about putting on a conference or symposium or having a speaker, the resources are there."

The interdisciplinary nature of the program also means that students can serve as genuine resources for faculty. "My contact with cognitive studies students has helped me to rethink the contours of my own field," says Gendler, whose recent research has looked at the role of the imagination in various contexts, including emotional responses to fiction and interpreting counter-moral situations. Her work has been informed by research in literary theory and neuroscience.

The program also encourages an interactive collaboration between graduate students on the Ithaca campus with their counterparts at the Sackler Institute of Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.