Research
Where the field publishes, meets, and works
We don't run a journal or a search engine — the field already has good ones. This page points to them, and to a directory of labs and researchers whose work is genuinely focused on cognitive science.
Societies & journals
The Cognitive Science Society is the field's central professional body, publishing Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science, and running the annual CogSci conference (see the Events page for the next one). Beyond the Society's own journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences is a widely-read monthly review journal spanning the same disciplines. For the education-facing edge of the field, the International Society of the Learning Sciences runs its own conferences and journal lineage, drawing on cognitive science alongside educational psychology and computer science.
Finding the literature
Google Scholar and ResearchGate remain the two most practical entry points for searching primary literature and finding a researcher's publication history directly. For background reading before diving into primary sources, MIT Press's Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a free, peer-reviewed, continuously growing reference — each article carries a DOI and is written by a researcher in the field.
Directory (early, seeded)
This directory is new. The list below is a seed set of academic and corporate labs whose work is genuinely focused on cognitive science, not a general-purpose research index — every entry links out to the lab's own page. Submissions are reviewed manually; independent researchers need a peer-reviewed, cognitive-science-relevant publication findable on Google Scholar to be listed.
Academic labs
- CCN LabUC Berkeley (Anne Collins)
Computational models of learning and executive function, part of the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.
- Bramley Computational Cognitive Science LabUniversity of Edinburgh
Causal cognition, active learning, and hypothesis generation, spanning psychology, philosophy, and computer science.
- Percepts and Concepts LabIndiana University Bloomington (Robert Goldstone)
Interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning, concept learning via computer simulation, decision making, mathematical cognition, and collective behavior.
- Computational Cognitive Neuroscience LabUniversity of Iowa (Jeffrey Cockburn)
Computational models of learning and cognitive control, tested with behavioral and brain-imaging methods, aimed at understanding and improving mental health.
- Perception & Mind Lablink unverifiedJohns Hopkins University
How seeing and thinking interact — the interface between perception and higher cognition.
- MIT Computational Cognitive Science LabMIT (Joshua Tenenbaum)
Probabilistic and computational models of human learning, inference, and causal reasoning.
- Princeton Computational Cognitive Science LabPrinceton University (Tom Griffiths)
Bayesian models and machine learning applied to human reasoning and learning.
- Purdue Laboratory for Computational Cognitive NeurosciencePurdue University (Sébastien Hélie)
Computational cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics approaches to automaticity, problem-solving, and decision-making, combining cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, and computational modeling.
- Cognitive Development LaboratoryRutgers University (RuCCS)
How cognitive abilities develop over childhood.
- Vision and Memory LabUC San Diego (Timothy Brady)
Visual working memory and how it constrains what we perceive and remember.
Corporate & industry labs
- Cognitive Modeling & Machine LearningGoogle Research India (Pradeep Shenoy)
Building ML systems that draw functional and algorithmic inspiration from human cognition — one of the few corporate teams meeting a genuine cognitive-science bar rather than general ML.
- Tools for ThoughtMicrosoft Research (Richard Banks, Sean Rintel)
Interdisciplinary social-science and computer-science work on how AI tools augment human cognition.