Research
Founded at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1968, the Institute of Cognitive Science conducts research to identify and address key questions in cognitive science, building on our expertise in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Recent research efforts have contributed both basic and applied knowledge in cognitive development, brain health and wellness, cognitive modeling, emotion detection and processing, education and training, educational technology, and speech and language processing. The Institute operates in partnership with nine academic departments: Psychology and Neuroscience, Computer Science, Linguistics, Education, Philosophy, Integrative Physiology, Architecture and Planning, Information Science, and Speech, Hearing and Language Science (SLHS). The Institute's community is broad and intellectually diverse, encompassing nearly 240 faculty, students, staff and other research personnel, many from our partner departments and other units.Ěý
The Institute of Cognitive Science research has focused in (but not limited to) three main areas in the past several years:
- Learning and Education: Theories, interventions, and innovative applications supportinghuman learning, sometimes augmented by artificial intelligence and machine learning, across a wide variety of learning and working environments
- Brain Health and Wellness: Basic and applied research on the neural basis of emotions, pain, and addiction, combined with the development of innovative frameworks and applications supporting new wellness therapies and interventions
- Cognition and Development: Basic and applied research into adolescent brain development, language processing, and decision-making
Increasingly, data-intensive research methods involving large quantities of data and/or multimodal data (brain, physiology, speech/text, performance) are used, which provides rich opportunities to build on and expand the research capacity in machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational methods.
ICS research is carried out by faculty and students in individual labs, interdisciplinary project teams, and through five interdisciplinary research centers hosted by the Institute.Ěý
ICS Research Centers & Labs
The NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming bring together a network of researchers from across the United States working side-by-side with public school districts, private companies and community leaders to transform education and create an inclusive and AI-literate workfoce.
CU REACH conducts rigorous, multidisciplinary research devoted to the development of evidence based knowledge regarding the effects of Cannabis.Ěý
CRT constructs theoretical and empirical frameworks that can account for and make accurate predictions about the effectiveness of different training methods over a large range of tasks, including military, industrial, vocational, and academic tasks.
iHub is a research+practice partnership engaged in research and development of materials, tools, and processes to promote equitable student learning of STEM. This partnership recently released InquiryHub Biology, an open access, high school biology curriculum designed to support the Next Generation Science Standards. Â Â
INC brings together neuroscientists who study complex psychological processes such as addiction, pain, emotion, attention, sleep, and learning and memory, as well as physicists and engineers who study and develop innovative MRI methods and analysis techniques.
Faculty led research laboratories are at the heart of the Institute of Cognitive Science's drive to fulfill its interdisciplinary mission.ĚýIn addition to the list of ICS faculty labs, a vast amount of research are conducted partnering with ICS fellows' labs.