Department of Cognitive Science

From the Head of the Department

The Cognitive Science Department was established in 1997, with the initiative of a small number of METU academicians who were highly enthusiastic about understanding various aspects of the human mind by carrying out interdisciplinary research.  The department aimed to bring together METU professors interested in cognitive sciences for teaching and research, and it had a desire to establish research links with universities across Turkey and the world.  It is now more than a decade that our department was established. Our goals of interdisciplinary research have largely been reached, we also take pride in the number and quality of the theses and research papers produced by the students and the staff of this small department. We are encouraged by such accomplishments, and our future aim is to extend the number and quality of our courses so that the department can better represent the evolving nature of the field and respond to the needs of more students and researchers.  
We encourage interested students and researchers from different disciplines to join us and help to enrich our interdisciplinary approach as well as realizing the goal of firmly establishing cognitive science as a discipline in Turkey.   

Warmest regards,

Deniz Zeyrek

What is Cognitive Science?

Cognitive Science is defined as the scientific study of mind from an interdisciplinary perspective. The main contributing disciplines across universities all over the world are computer science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and neuroscience. Its origins can be traced back to the mid-1950s when theories of mind were developed based on representations and computational procedures. In 1977, the first organization, Cognitive Science Society was formed and its journal Cognitive Science was published.

Cognitive Science is not a simple sum of the contributing disciplines. With the cooperation of related disciplines, it exhibits theoretical and methodological variety in the study of mind.

Today, there are more than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia that have established cognitive science programs. However, the number of international conferences on cognitive science and related disciplines is much higher. Considering the list of disciplines in Cognitive Science, namely anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, 21 possible two-discipline multidisciplinary combinations exist. Among these combinations, 11 have standard labels (e.g. “psycholinguistics” as a combination of psychology and linguistics, or “computational neuroscience” as a combination of artificial intelligence and neuroscience) and 15 have associated journals.

Cognitive Science at METU

The Cognitive Science program at Middle East Technical University was established in 1997 as a graduate program within the Informatics Institute. It is the first and the only cognitive science program in Turkey to offer both MS and PhD degrees. (see Graduate Curriculum)