I. Knowledge about Cognitive Science
A. Characterize the nature of cognitive science as a discipline
Understand the cross-disciplinary, historical foundations of cognitive science.
Understand the research problems that unify the cognitive sciences, including language, thought, perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, judgment, and decision-making.
Understand the assumptions, methods and concepts that unify and differentiate the cognitive sciences.
Understand the diversity of theoretical approaches and paradigms across the cognitive sciences, including neural, embodied, social, and/or technological approaches.
B. Demonstrate Knowledge of the Principal Cognitive Science Concepts, Methods and Paradigms
Demonstrate knowledge of the fundamentals of psychology, philosophy of mind and language, linguistics, artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their bearing on research problems in cognitive science.
Characterize the advantages, disadvantages and applications of different research approaches within the cognitive sciences.
Demonstrate inter-disciplinary knowledge of the fundamental concepts and methods in the cognitive scientist’s toolkit.
Acquire facility with a range of formal and informal thinking skills: classical logic, philosophical logic and argumentation, experimental design, algorithm design, statistical reasoning, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, mathematical and computational modeling.
II. Inter-Disciplinary Research Skills
A. Cross-Disciplinary Methods
Apply and combine a cross-disciplinary range of methods to research problems.
Evaluate the suitability of methods from multiple disciplines with regard to particular research problems.
Integrate data from different disciplines to draw new conclusions and formulate new hypotheses.
Show awareness and sensitivity to ethical issues arising from the application of methods across the cognitive sciences.
B. Inter-Disciplinary Communication Skills
Bring together language and concepts from different disciplines to address common research problems.
Effectively communicate ideas from the cognitive sciences to non-specialists.
Effectively communicate ideas and results from each of the cognitive sciences to specialists working in other cognitive science fields.
C. Cross-Disciplinary Judgement
Assess the importance of results in each of the cognitive sciences to researchers working in other cognitive science fields.
Assess the importance of results in each of the cognitive sciences to law, medicine and public policy.
Evaluate popular media reports of research across the cognitive sciences.