The master’s program in Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary research master offered in English. It will prepare students with very diverse background for an academic career in cognitive science. The program combines a systematic overview of all the scientific disciplines contributing to cognitive science with in-depth expertise in areas of the student’s personal interest.

What is Cognitive Science? Cognitive Science is a dynamic, interdisciplinary area of research, aiming to understand how the human mind works. For this purpose, cognitive scientists combine a theoretical understanding of the matter with systematic empirical research. Here are just a couple of questions that cognitive scientists examine:

• Learning and Memory: What are the basic mechanisms of learning,forgetting, and remembering?
• Human Agency and Actions: What are the principles of action guidance in humans? How do we understand the actions of others?
• Emotions: What is the role of emotions in cognitive processing?
• Perception: What are the neural processes underlying object recognition?
• Language Acquisition and Understanding: How do acquire our native language and how to we learn second languages? What does it mean to possess concepts?
• Decision Making: How do we make decisions? What does it mean to be rational?
• Cognitive Evolution: How did the cognitive capacities of humans and animals evolve?
• Animal Cognition: What are the similarities and differences between human and animal cognition?

The 2-year Master Cognitive Science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) offers a unique opportunity to enter into the fascinating field of cognitive science. It combines systematic and empirical approaches from philosophy, psychology, neuro-informatics, psychiatry and the neurosciences. Students will be trained to use and combine different methodological approaches in order to gain new insights in key problems in the field of cognitive science and generate interdisciplinary solutions to solve them.

In order to engage with these questions not only theoretically but also empirically, students will be trained in several empirical and experimental methods, such as: Key methods of research in the Master Cognitive Science at RUB include:

• Neuropsychology: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Studies (EEG, fMRI)
• Experimental Psychology: Statistical Analysis and Experimental Design
• Philosophy: Basic and Advanced Logic, Philosophy of Mind
• Neuroinformatics: Computational Modeling

For further information about the program, please contact Beate Krauß (cogsci-info@rub.de).