IRR: Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science

What is your topic area? 

Cognitive science is the study of mental representations and processes. Traditionally, it combines theories and methodologies from Artificial Intelligence, Anthropology, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Psychology; however, nowadays it also introduces insights from Computer Science, Economics, Education and Evolutionary Biology. A fundamental endeavour of cognitive science is to construct formal theories of our rich mental lives and how they influence our behaviour. 


What differentiates your programme area (or sub area if you have multiple interviews) from the other programmes on the Informatics MSc portfolio.

The CogSci MSc focuses on modelling and understanding behaviour, allowing theoretical courses from PPLS in addition to artificial intelligence and computer science courses in Informatics.

 

Are there go-to sources to find reviews and perspectives on these research topics. i.e. are there any good review journals that are worth browsing to get topic overviews.

Trends in Cognitive Science: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/home

Behavioural & Brain Sciences: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/19395086


What are the key journals or conferences in the field for finding high quality research papers in these topics 

 

Not all areas of cognitive science are fast moving. The following conferences will give you a feel for what’s at issue in the field at the moment. CogSci is a good temperature for the whole field, the others skew more computer science. 

CogSci Conference: https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/past-conferences/

Neurips: https://papers.nips.cc/

ACL: https://aclanthology.org/

AAI Artificial Intelligence: https://www.aaai.org/Library/AAAI/aaai-library.php

Here are venues that tend to publish high quality material. I would not necessarily recommend flipping through them to find a source topic. Anthropology, Linguistics and Philosophy make varying use of journals/conferences compared to monographs. Venues particularly relevant for potential Informatics supervisors are denoted with a *

Cognitive Science

*Open Mind: https://direct.mit.edu/opmi

*CogSci Conference: https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/past-conferences/

Cognitive Science: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15516709

Artificial Intelligence

*Neurips: https://papers.nips.cc/

*ACL: https://aclanthology.org/

*AAI Artificial Intelligence: https://www.aaai.org/Library/AAAI/aaai-library.php

Anthropology

Evolutionary Human Sciences: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences

Journal of Cognition & Culture: https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/jocc-overview.xml

Linguistics

*ACL: https://aclanthology.org/

*Journal of Pragmatics: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-pragmatics

*Journal of Semantics: https://academic.oup.com/jos

Journal Experimental Psych: Learing, Memory & Language: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/xlm

Glossa: https://www.glossa-journal.org/

Journal of Language Evolution: https://academic.oup.com/jole

Neuroscience

*Neurips: https://papers.nips.cc/

*PLOS Computational Biology: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/

Current Biology: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/libraries/neurobiology-cognition-and-behavior

eLife: https://elifesciences.org/subjects/neuroscience

Neuron: https://www.cell.com/neuron/home

Journal of Neuroscience: https://www.jneurosci.org/

Neural Computation: https://direct.mit.edu/neco

Philosophy

Synthese: https://www.springer.com/journal/11229

Psychology

*PsychReview: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/rev

*Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: https://www.springer.com/journal/13423

*Cognition: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognition

*Computational Brain & Behavior: https://www.springer.com/journal/42113

Psych Science: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/pss

Developmental Science: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14677687

Nature Human Behaviour: https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

Cognitive Psychology: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognitive-psychology

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/xge

Journal of Vision: https://jov.arvojournals.org/

Journal of Mathematical Psychology: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-mathematical-psychology

 

Are there any particular high profile or rapidly growing research areas in the programme that you would suggest might be worth looking at for potential IRR themes. (List three or more otherwise every IRR will be in that same area) 

 

By no means is this exhaustive :)

 

  • Text Summarization/Identifying or Modeling Disinformation/ Hate Speech Detection
  • Visual Question Answering/Multimodal NLP
  • Semantic/Syntactic Parsing
  • Low Resource Language Tools (emph Morphology or Prosody)
  • Evolutionary or Emerging Language Systems/Grounded Language Learning
  • Social Media NLP
  • Physical Reasoning/Object or Agent Machine Vision
  • Active or Causal Learning
  • AI for Pedagogy
  • Computational Psychiatry (emph autism)
  • Spiking Neural Network models
  • Computational Neuroscience


​Contributor: F Mollica

Last update: 13 October 2021


 

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