Cognitive Sciences Research
INSTAR's cognitive science program investigates how minds — biological and artificial — represent, process, and act on information. The field is inherently interdisciplinary: rigorous answers to questions about perception, language, reasoning, and learning require simultaneous engagement with psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and AI. That convergence is exactly what INSTAR is built to support, and it makes cognitive science one of our most strategically important research areas at a moment when understanding intelligence has direct national implications.
Perception & Attention
Perception research asks how the brain converts raw sensory data into the stable, actionable representations we call experience. We investigate visual object recognition, auditory scene analysis, and multisensory integration using psychophysics, EEG, fMRI, and computational models drawn from signal processing and machine learning. A recurring theme is how attention and prior knowledge modulate sensory processing — questions that matter for human-machine interface design, clinical assessment of sensory disorders, and the benchmarking of artificial perceptual systems against biological baselines.
Reasoning & Decision-Making
We study how people form causal models, draw analogical inferences, and make choices under uncertainty — and how those processes succeed or fail in systematic ways. Bayesian frameworks and neural network models provide complementary theoretical lenses, one emphasizing rational inference under constraints, the other learned representations from statistical exposure. Understanding where human reasoning departs from normative models has direct relevance for AI alignment: you cannot build systems that reliably assist human judgment without understanding how that judgment works.
INSTAR's cognitive science researchers work in close dialogue with our machine intelligence, neuroscience, and linguistics programs. This convergence is deliberate: the hardest questions about mind span all of these disciplines, and the Fellowship pathway at community/fellowship welcomes postdoctoral scholars who want to work at those intersections.
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