Main Research Area Cognitive Science

Summary

A central goal of every form of cognition is to grasp the environment and make it understandable. As humans, we want to understand, for example, how our environment is changing or not changing, understand how we can successfully influence the course of events, understand what will happen next, understand how undesirable consequences can be avoided, etc. Basic cognitive abilities enable us humans to get one step closer to this goal. We use them, for example, to selectively focus our attention on the important things at the moment and temporarily block out unimportant things, or to initially disambiguate ambiguous situations and stimuli in the environment and interpret them unambiguously. Building on this, higher-order cognitive abilities, such as understanding and interpreting language or logical reasoning, also play a crucial role in making the environment understandable.

The goal of the interdisciplinary Main Research Area (MRA) Cognitive Science is to bring together findings from the various participating disciplines that deal with human, animal, and artificial cognition, thus synergistically generating new cognitive science insights. Researchers from all four Fields of Focus at Heidelberg University are involved in this MRA, and through interdisciplinary collaboration on the common topic of cognition, new bridges are being built between the humanities, behavioral sciences, life sciences, and computer science. A pluralism of methods is also explicitly promoted in this MRA. One focus is on the quantitative recording and modeling of cognitive processes using behavioral observations and (neuro-)physiological measurements. However, qualitative and theoretical approaches are also used.

The vision of this initiative is to establish a focus on cognitive science in research and teaching at Heidelberg University, which – in the best tradition of Heidelberg University – combines transdisciplinary breadth with academic excellence.