Area Coordinator:
See the How to Apply section of the Graduate Program Overview.
Program Overview
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental function, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, language, and decision making. The modern study of cognition stems from the discovery that the mind/brain can be studied and understood as a complex computational system. The doctoral program in cognitive psychology offers students the opportunity to conduct original research in modern laboratories featuring state-of-the-art equipment. Training emphasizes theoretical, experimental, and technical foundations, and includes the use of cutting-edge artificial intelligence methods, as well as mathematical and computational modeling techniques. The cognitive faculty are internationally known and award-winning researchers, teachers, and mentors with outstanding records of innovation, extramural funding, and public outreach. Graduate education is enhanced by close ties with the Center for Cognitive Science and by collaborations with faculty in several related departments as well as with scientists from industries engaged in basic and applied research. We seek creative and self-motivated students who are passionate about the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. The cognitive area is committed to strategies that increase the engagement and retention of underrepresented groups in STEM. Graduate students from our program have gone on to work in academia, high-tech and research consultancy companies, finance, and technology labs.
Please also see information about the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science
Cognitive Psychology Graduate Course/Credit Requirements
This information is accurate as of 03/01/2022. However, this information is periodically updated. It is possible that there is a lag between the change of requirements and the updating of this page. Therefore, this is presented for informational purposes only and does not necessarily constitute the official policies of the Psychology Graduate Program or the Cognitive Area. To find out the actual and most up-to-date policy of the Cognitive Area please contact
Big Questions in Cognitive Psychology
- What is the nature of human intelligence?
- Where does knowledge come from?
- How do we perceive, learn, and remember?
- How do we plan our actions and make decisions?
- How can we use basic science to solve concrete problems?
Core Faculty:
-
Jacob Feldman
- Information
- Professor
-
Arnold Glass
- Information
- Professor
-
Pernille Hemmer
- Information
- Professor
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. I completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at Syracuse University before joining the faculty at Rutgers University in 2012. My research focuses on episodic and semantic memory, as well as decision making in naturalistic environments. Specifically, I focus on complex environments in which people make real world decisions about situations where prior knowledge of the environment can be brought to bear. In memory I am interested in how people integrate noisy and incomplete information stored in episodic memory with prior knowledge of their environment. I experimentally quantify people’s prior knowledge for a wide range of domains, e.g., size, height, scenes and time. In a series of studies I have explored how people use their knowledge and expectations to make sense of their environment and appear to use this information optimally in a broad range of cognitive tasks. Another direction in my research is to explore individual differences in rational models of cognition. While rational models provide qualitative predictions for human performance, these predictions are at an aggregate level and do not allow for inference about the individual participant. This necessitates the application of Bayesian analysis methods to the output from the rational model. I have used this approach to infer the proportion of participants who use an informative prior, as well as the distribution over priors at the individual subject level. -
Judith Hudson
- Information
- Professor
-
Michelle Hurst
- Information
- Assistant Professor
-
Alan Leslie
- Information
- Distinguished Professor
-
Melchi Michel
- Information
- Associate Professor
-
Julien Musolino
- Information
- Professor
-
Manish Singh
- Information
- Professor
-
Karin Stromswold
- Information
- Professor
-
Elizabeth Torres
- Information
- Professor
-
Jenny Wang
- Information
- Assistant Professor
-
Qiong Zhang
- Information
- Assistant Professor