About the Department
Welcome to the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. The department's World Wide Web site contains a great deal of information about who we are and what we do. If you would like more information than you can find here, please contact directly the department member you think most relevant, or, for general information, contact a member of our administrative staff.
Members of the Department of Brain and 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 been 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.
The emergence of the brain and cognitive sciences as strong new academic disciplines is recognized in the founding of
the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. The Department is home to 17 faculty
with primary appointments and to closely associated faculty with primary appointments in other departments.
Our faculty and their research programs are a
major intellectual force, with national and international reputations in several fields. Our research spans a large
domain and straddles several disciplines in the behavioral, neural and computational sciences, but all our work is
connected by the idea that to understand behavior we must study not only behavior but also the processes—both
neural and computational—that underlie it. The importance of this work is recognized both in the numerous
honors conferred on faculty, and in their great success in attracting funds to support their research (principally
from the National Institutes of Health and the National
Science Foundation). Our commitment to research also means a commitment to train future research workers, and
here too we have an outstanding record, attracting students of the highest caliber into our
graduate program and investing heavily in them while they work with us.
Undergraduates too have a major place in this new enterprise: we believe very strongly that study of the brain and
cognitive sciences provides a superb general intellectual training, and a marvelous opportunity for students to engage
themselves in research work with faculty and learn the logic of scientific enquiry. This conviction is reflected in
the structure of our undergraduate programs, which offer students a
wide range of opportunities to explore the breadth and depth of our discipline.
Our Department provides a focus for studying cognition, complex behavior, and brain function. But we also recognize
this pursuit as an interdisciplinary endeavor, and the Department and its members have strong ties to
associated programs in other academic departments and centers, notably
Computer Science, Linguistics,
Music, Visual
Science, and several neuroscience departments in the
Medical Center.
It is important to point out that students with interests in one or more of these associated programs can take courses and obtain research experiences with faculty in any of these units, while maintaining a primary connection to the program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences.