Archives — August 2026

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA)- ESA / Hubble CollaborationAcknowledgment: R. Chandar (U. Toledo) & J. Miller (U. Michigan)

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and how it processes information — perception, memory, attention, language, reasoning, decision-making, and learning — drawing on psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology at once rather than belonging fully to any one of them. This guide answers the definitional question in depth, then adds the layer a research-administration standards body is positioned to add well: the real funding landscape, the methods and tools the field runs on, and how researchers actually train into it. Cognitive science studies the mind as an information-processing system: how it represents knowledge, perceives the world, forms and retrieves memories, produces and understands language, reasons and makes decisions, and how those processes are realized in the brain (and, in computational and artificial-intelligence work, how comparable processes might be realized in a machine). It is explicitly interdisciplinary by design — not a single method or a single home department, but a shared set of questions approached from several directions at once.