The Constructor University BSc in Integrated Social and Cognitive Psychology adopts a holistic approach to understanding human behavior, recognizing the complex interplay of factors that shape our actions and thoughts. This interplay can include biological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors that interact in complex ways.

Cognitive Science is the study of how processes in the mind shape human behavior. Cognitive scientists use advanced statistics, and sensitive experimental methods, to reveal the nature of these processes. They do this to advance our knowledge of human thought and behavior, and to apply this knowledge in real-world settings.

Cognitive Science, like psychology, aims to understand the mind's complexities and how the brain's mental processes influence behaviour. It emerged in the 1950s as a response to Behaviourism, which argued that behaviour is shaped by past experiences and conditioning.

Cognitive science involves the study of cognition, perception, and emotion from a wide range of perspectives. Despite the many different methodologies they use, cognitive scientists are united in their interest in the mind—and the brain.

Cognitive science explores the nature of cognitive processes such as perception, reasoning, memory, attention, language, decision making, imagery, motor control, and problem solving. The goal of cognitive science, stated simply, is to understand how the mind works. Cognitive science is an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, drawing on tools and ideas from fields such as psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, economics, and neuroscience.

Drawing from principles of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and computing, this program explores the science of the mind and thought. Cognitive scientists are probing the concept of intelligence in humans and animals in order to program intelligent computers that are not only capable of performing complex tasks, but of thinking complex thoughts.

How does the mind work? This is the foundational tenet of cognitive science. It is the interdisciplinary study of human behavior and intelligence, with a focus on how information is perceived, processed and transformed. The field draws from anthropology, biology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy and sociology to learn how the mind determines behavior.

Psychologists conduct experiments to study cognitive abilities such as how we perceive others, how we make decisions, how we remember or how we speak. Cognitive Neuroscientists link these questions directly to underlying brain processes: they make use of brain imaging techniques to answer which brain areas support these abilities. They also use time-sensitive imaging methodologies to explore the exact timing of these processes. Together, researchers from both disciplines aim to map the relationship between brain and behaviour.

Cognitive Science is an emerging field that brings together various approaches to the study of human cognition, drawing from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science. Historically, a study in Cognitive Science has been conducted within these traditional disciplines and such study still represents important areas of research, such as in cognitive psychology within psychology or artificial intelligence within computer science. However, increasingly many researchers and practitioners are feeling a need for a background that integrates basic knowledge in the foundational disciplines and prepares them to work across academic fields.

We conceive of cognitive science as a loose federation of six specific disciplines. The disciplines included are neuroscience, computer science (including computer engineering), linguistics, mathematics and statistics, philosophy, and cognitive psychology. To demonstrate the breadth, students majoring or minoring in cognitive science are required to complete credits in at least three of these six disciplines.