LA&S Offers New Multidisciplinary Initiative

With four new hires and others planned, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has launched a new multidisciplinary initiative in cognitive studies. As a relatively new disciplinary field, cognitive studies draws from several established disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and biology, notes Dean Frederick Kitterle.

"The field of cognitive studies varies in content at different institutions, focusing on one or more of the following areas: perception, learning, memory, knowledge, meaning, reasoning, language, attention, affect consciousness, and the control of action," he says.

"It is a field that attempts to understand the structures and processes that make certain cognitive achievements possibleÑsuch as writing a play, planning a course of action, or learning a language. It assumes that these acts are the results of complex computations, and researchers in the field seek to understand the nature of these computations and the order in which they occur."

Undergraduate courses and curricula in cognitive studies will emphasize the integrative, interdisciplinary nature of new research and the changes it has worked in our understanding of the mind and behavior, continues Kitterle. The new field reflects the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' emphasis on multidisciplinary teaching and research and will strengthen and facilitate collaboration among faculty and students, he adds.

"Our development of a cognitive studies emphasis was consistent with the desire of the college to provide undergraduate students with more opportunities to see how knowledge is interconnected, how the theories and approaches of different disciplines can converge to enhance our understanding of complex thought processes, and how students themselves could work with faculty to help discover and characterize those processes," notes Kitterle. "It will occupy a significant place in the undergraduate experience and will be an important option for students."

Kitterle, whose own academic discipline is psychology, says there are a number of potential benefits for students in cognitive studies.

"First, cognitive studies addresses some of the major questions of intellectual discourse: What is the nature of meaning? Are perception and knowledge objective? What is the relationship between mind and brain? What is consciousness? Such questions are central to undergraduate education, and they are of great interest to contemporary undergraduates. Cognitive studies' empirical approach to these questions provides a bridge between science and areas of academic pursuit that have become increasingly distant from science.

"Second, cognitive studies can be a premier area of general science education where students can be exposed to philosophical questions about the human mind and the empirical, scientific approach to answering those questions," says Kitterle. "In short, cognitive studies opens up a rich vein of discourse among people with very different views of science," he says.

"Finally, cognitive studies is being applied in important areas of public policy and technology," continues Kitterle. "Issues in human/computer interaction, workplace organization, reading remediation, mathematics education, cognition and aging, and the reliability of traumatic memories, are among the many being pursued by cognitive scientists. Increasingly, some familiarity with cognitive science will be a condition for informed citizenship."

New hires in the Departments of Anthropology, Computer Science, Psychology, and English (linguistics) will likely be followed by new hires in other departments as well, says Kitterle. The expertise of the new faculty will reflect the intersecting interests of all the departments in exploring the interdisciplinary implications of cognitive science, he says.

"I am confident that our new hires will add to the strength of their respective departments and enhance the increasing multidisciplinary focus of the college's curriculum," he says. "We are encouraging them, as well as others we hope to hire, to develop a coordinated, coherent, and integrated curriculum and programs of research that involve undergraduate as well as graduate students," he notes.

Kitterle also believes that the new initiative provides a unique opportunity at NIU for cross-college collaboration--for example with faculty members in the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology who are interested in speech recognition, or faculty members in the College of Health and Human Sciences who are interested in communicative disorders. Moreover, the linking of diverse expertise on major research issues provides increased opportunity for NIU to position itself for highly prestigious National Science Foundation Interdisciplinary Research Grants, he notes.