About BCS
BCS Graduate Program Ranked Among Elite Cognitive Science and Psychology programs
According to the recent National Research Council rankings, the graduate program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester is ranked as high as 4th nationally among 236 PhD programs in Cognitive Science and Psychology (based on both the S-range and R-range measures). The BCS faculty ranked as high as 3rd nationally for research according to the Faculty Research Activity measure. The complete ranking information can be found at http://www.nap.edu/rdp/. A sortable list of rankings can be found here.
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.