About BCS
Members of the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences study how we see and hear, move, learn and remember, reason, produce and understand spoken and signed languages, and how these remarkable capabilities depend upon the workings of the brain. We also study how these capabilities develop during infancy and childhood, and how the brain matures and becomes organized to perform complex behavior.
Advances in various branches of the biological sciences and in computer science, along with striking progress in the behavioral sciences during the last fifteen years, have fundamentally altered the way we approach the study of these perceptual and cognitive skills. The disciplines of computer science and neuroscience, both of which have enjoyed explosive growth, have profoundly influenced the scientific study of thinking, perception, learning and memory, and language, and have fueled the emergence of the field of cognitive science. The recognition that what the brain does is analyze information (i.e., it is a computer), and resulting efforts to represent its function in formal computational models, have brought powerful new insights to our understanding of visual perception, language and reasoning. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that the brain is a very special computer—that its biology imposes powerful constraints on the kinds of computation undertaken, and (given many possible formal ways to organize a particular behavior) the particular method adopted. These developments, together with major advances in the behavioral analysis of perception and cognition, have provided us with marvelous new opportunities for understanding the brain and behavior.