A gateway, not an encyclopedia
The science of thinking things
Cognitive science studies the mind by combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology — six older fields asking one shared question: how does perception become belief, language become thought, and could a machine ever do either?
For Researchers
Find the field's people and venues
Societies, journals, and a directory that sets the bar at focused, published work.
For Students
Degree programs, by institution
Degrees, fellowships, and self-directed tracks from institutions actually doing the work.
For Everyone Else
The top shelf
Books, podcasts, magazines, and free courses, chosen for people just getting curious.
Latest in the news
Compressing complex goals into simple reward rules makes goal-dependent learning more efficient
Molinaro and Anne Collins at the University of California, Berkeley report six behavioral experiments on how people learn to pursue arbitrary, abstract goals. They propose that goal-dependent learning first relies on capacity-limited working memory, and that with consistent experience learners build a compressed reward function, a simplified rule that moves to long-term memory and lets feedback be evaluated automatically. Learning was impaired as the goal space grew larger but improved when the goal space allowed compression, and faster reward processing correlated with better learning. Computational modeling indicated that individual differences in compression efficiency, proxied by reward processing speed, predicted higher choice accuracy. The authors note that the algorithmic details remain to be established.
Next on the calendar
ESSLLI 2027 — call for course and workshop proposals
Submitted online (EasyChair) · October 15, 2026
Independent organization · For researchers
The Cognitive Science Society publishes the field's research
Not part of this site — the Cognitive Science Society is the field's own professional body, founded in 1979. It publishes two peer-reviewed journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science, and runs the annual CogSci conference.