The Center for Mind & Cognition (CMC) is an interdisciplinary platform at the Ruhr-University Bochum. The objective of the Center for Mind & Cognition is to investigate the enigmatic and at the same time fascinating nature of the mind and its constitutive cognitive processes by tapping the full potential of interdisciplinary collaborations. A better understanding of cognition from multiple perspectives will contribute to the development of an empirically anchored integrative understanding of the architecture of mind and cognition. The special strategy of CMC is to investigate the same normal or pathological behavior from different perspectives including evolutionary, ontogenetic, mechanistic, computational, functional, social and especially philosophical explanations. This is e.g. realized in the Research Training Group “Situated Cognition” or the Research Unit “Constructing Scenarios of the Past”. Thereby, the Center aims to promote progress in the explanation and prediction of concrete cognitive phenomena, such as consciousness and self-consciousness, episodic memory, learning, emotion, perception and action as well as linguistic understanding and all aspects of social cognition. We systematically integrate philosophical theory formation with neural computation and empirical research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience as well as with cognitive research in psychiatry, engineering, law and educational science. The Center therefore complements the work in the Research Department of Neuroscience.

History: The Center for Mind and Cognition was founded in 2018 at RUB integrating the work of the sub-center for „Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution“ and more recent developments in Cognitive Science.