Cognitive science can be looked at as a huge interdisciplinary endeavour, connecting various fields, technical, social or humanities, with the goal to study the basic components of cognition – perception, reasoning, thinking and behavior. Cognitive science emerged in the 1950s, it passed through various changes and gave rise to different lines of thought. The key (so called mother) disciplines of cognitive science are psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics and antropology.
Master programme in cognitive science has been running at the Faculty of mathematics, physics and informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava since 2006. The programme is an integral part of Middle European Interdisciplinary Master Programme in Cognitive Science within the open consortium of (currently) four universities: University in Vienna (in collaboration with Medical University in Vienna), University in Ljubljana, Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest, and Comenius University in Bratislava (perspective partners are Jagiellonian University in Kraków and University of Zagreb). The unique features of the programme curriculum are the mobility semester (at the chosen university of the consortium) and international MEi:CogSci conference (with active participation of students).
The graduates of the cognitive science master programme will be familiar with the most recent knowledge about the human mind, will be able to combine formal approaches of informatics with experimental methods of psychology and neuroscience. His/her profile will be oriented to mutual complementarity and integration of both approaches. The graduates will acquire the skills to design and implement integrated intelligent systems and large-scale modern application with a significant incorporation of methods of artificial intelligence and psychological science. They will also know how to design and interpret computational simulations in the whole spectrum of problems related to applications of cognitive science. Since the working language of the international consortium is English, they will be able to competently use English resources and present their results in this language.
MEi:CogSci conference takes place annually in June and is always organized by one of the universities in the consortium. Its purpose is to enable the students to present the results of their work and get feedback from their peers and from teachers. The first-year students present a poster, the second-year students give a talk (in English). Each student of cognitive science participates twice at the conference, which takes 2-3 days, and also provides opportunity to invited speakers from the universities of the consortium to present their research.
upcoming 12-14 June 2025 in Ljubljana, 2024 in Bratislava, 2023 in Budapest, 2022 in Zagreb, 2021 online, 2020 in Vienna (online), 2019 in Ljubljana, 2018 in Bratislava, 2017 in Budapest, 2016 in Vienna, 2015 in Ljubljana, 2014 in Kraków, 2013 in Budapest, 2012 in Bratislava, 2011 in Ljubljana, 2010 in Dubrovnik, 2009 in Vienna, 2008 in Bratislava, 2007 in Vienna.