Cognitive Science affiliated faculty members head or are a part of each of the following research centers and labs. Therefore they are suitable for students thinking about getting involved with research and/or pursuing the honors program.
Affective Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Affiliated faculty: Sonia Bishop
Much of the lab’s recent work falls under the umbrella of ‘computational psychiatry’. Here they believe in taking a 3-step approach: (i) identifying clinical symptomatology or clinical presentation of interest, (ii) computationally characterizing associated cognitive processes and how these vary as a function of psychiatrically pertinent traits or dimensions of symptomatology, (iii) relating computational models of cognition to changes in BOLD activity obtained by asking participants to perform tasks tapping the cognitive processes in question while fMRI data is acquired.
Banks Lab
Affiliated faculty: Marty Banks
Research in this lab focuses on visual space perception and sensory combination.
Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR)
Affiliated faculty: Anca Dragan, Dan Klein, David Bamman, Michael DeWeese, Alison Gopnik, Marti Hearst, Bruno Olhausen, Jitendra Malik
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab brings together UC Berkeley researchers across the areas of computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, planning, and robotics. BAIR includes over two dozen faculty and more than a hundred graduate students pursuing research on fundamental advances in the above areas as well as cross-cutting themes including multi-modal deep learning, human-compatible AI, and connecting AI with other scientific disciplines and the humanities.
Berkeley Early Learning Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Fei Xu
This lab is interested in how young learners understand probability, reason about preferences, make categorizations, and acquire language. For more information about specific study goals, please visit the Projects page.
Berkeley Institute for Data Science
Affiliated faculty: David Bamman (senior fellow)
BIDS supports faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate/undergraduate research across a variety of fields in the life, social, and physical sciences, the humanities, and in computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.
Berkeley Natural Language Processing Group
Affiliated Faculty: Dan Klein
Berkeley NLP is a group of EECS faculty and students working to understand and model natural language. They are a part of Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) inside of UC Berkeley Computer Science. They work on a broad range of topics including structured prediction, grounded language, computational linguistics, model robustness, and HCI.
Berkeley PhonLab
Affiliated Faculty: Susanne Gahl & Keith Johnson
The UC Berkeley PhonLab (Phonetics/Phonology Lab) focuses on documenting and explaining sound patterns in language. This includes physical studies of aerodynamic and articulatory factors in speech production, behavioral and neural imaging studies of speech perception, as well as linguistic studies of synchronic and diachronic language sound patterns.
Berkeley Social Interaction Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Dacher Keltner
Research focuses on the biological and evolutionary origins of emotion, in particular prosocial states such as compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and power, social class, and inequality.
Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory (Bunge Lab)
Affiliated Faculty: Silvia Bunge
This lab draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research.
Caldwell Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Roy Caldwell
This lab focuses on research related to evolution, animal behavior, behavioral ecology, communication, sensory ecology, and aggressive behavior.
Carmena Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Jose Carmena
This lab leverages neuroplasticity, machine learning, and neurotechnology to ask how the brain learns and controls movement, and to develop smart prosthetics and neurotherapies.
Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence
Affiliated Faculty: Stuart Russel & Anca Dragan
Artificial intelligence research is concerned with the design of machines capable of intelligent behavior, i.e., behavior likely to be successful in achieving objectives. The long-term outcome of AI research seems likely to include machines that are more capable than humans across a wide range of objectives and environments. This raises a problem of control: given that the solutions developed by such systems are intrinsically unpredictable by humans, it may occur that some such solutions result in negative and perhaps irreversible outcomes for humans. CHAI’s goal is to ensure that this eventuality cannot arise, by refocusing AI away from the capability to achieve arbitrary objectives and towards the ability to generate provably beneficial behavior. Because the meaning of beneficial depends on properties of humans, this task inevitably includes elements from the social sciences in addition to AI.
Cognition and Action Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Richard Ivry
Research projects cover diverse areas of behavior and cognition, including visual, auditory, and time perception; language and speech; and motor coordination.
Experiments incorporate a combination of behavioral, perceptual and cognitive tasks with both healthy participants and patient populations. Neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and non-invasive brain stimulation such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are also used. Several researchers are involved in collaborative work with neuroscientists and/or physicians located at other research and hospital facilities located in the United States and around the world.
Cognitive Development and Learning Lab (Gopnik Lab)
Affiliated Faculty: Alison Gopnik
In the Gopnik lab, they are particularly interested in how children learn causal relations - cases where one event causes another. They investigate exactly how children acquire very sophisticated understandings and representations of the causal world around them.
Cognitive Neuroanatomy Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Kevin Weiner
The over-arching goal of our research works toward building mechanistic models explaining how brain structure and function contribute to measurable behaviors. They implement a multi-modal approach of anatomical measurements in living and post-mortem individuals across spatial scales to compare to functional measurements in humans (typically high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging).
Computation and Language Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Steve Piantadosi
Colala's research includes computational and experimental approaches to language acquisition, language processing, and understanding the core features of language. Our work draws on corpus methods, behavioral experiments with adults and children, computational and mathematical modeling, as well as state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning, information theory, statistics, computer science, and linguistics.
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Anne Collins
Research focuses on learning and executive function. Research is guided by the belief that the brain's processes for learning and decision making are complex and multi-faceted, more like a symphony played by many musicians, each good at their own instrument, than a melody played by one or two instruments.
D'Esposito Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Mark D'Esposito
Research in the D'Esposito Lab investigates the neural bases of high-level cognitive processes such as working memory with the aim to translate this knowledge into clinical therapies to treat cognitive deficits.
DeWeese Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Michael DeWeese
This group has diverse interests in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, deep learning theory, and experimental + theoretical neuroscience.
Embodied Design Research Laboratory (EDRL)
Affiliated Faculty: Dor Abrahamson
EDRL is a design-based research lab studying mathematical cognition and instruction by creating and evaluating theory-driven educational innovation using both traditional and cutting-edge media
Experimental Cognition Laboratory
Affiliated Faculty: William Thompson
At the Experimental Cognition Laboratory, we conduct basic interdisciplinary research in computational cognitive science. We study the cognitive algorithms that allow people to make discoveries, learn from others, communicate knowledge creatively, and reason about each other’s minds. The goal of our research is to better incorporate the richness of human social interaction into computational theories of intelligence and emerging technologies.
Our approach integrates perspectives from psychology, computer science, linguistics, and cultural evolution, with a focus on the development of methods that combine advances in machine learning with large-scale behavioral data. We are committed to the development of knowledge that benefits society and contributes to the challenge of addressing collective action problems such as the climate crisis and ethical integration of artificial intelligence into society. If you are interested in joining or visiting the lab, please get in touch at ecl-ucb@berkeley.edu.
InterACT Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Anca Dragan
This group’s research agenda is to formalize and algorithmically solve the problem of robot action not in isolation, but for assistance of and in coordination with people – this is what they call robot action for people, and around people.
Jacobs Lab of Cognitive Biology
Affiliated Faculty: Lucia Jacobs
This work synthesizes concepts from ecology, animal behavior, cognitive science and neuroscience in order to understand the evolution of universal cognitive traits, such as spatial memory and navigation.
Jagust Lab
Affiliated Faculty: William Jagust
The Jagust Lab is engaged in the study of brain aging and dementia. They use the techniques of positron emission tomography (PET), structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience to understand the anatomic, biochemical, and neurochemical bases of changes in behavior with age and dementia.
Kaufer Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Daniela Kaufer
The Kaufer Lab investigates molecular events that underlie brain plasticity and deterioration in the face of stress and neurological insults throughout life. While they are primarily a molecular neuroscience lab, they use interdisciplinary approaches ranging from cell culture to behavioral analysis, and frequently collaborate to expand our methods of analysis including high-resolution imaging, electrophysiology, and high-throughput methods.
Kidd Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Celeste Kidd
The Kidd Lab studies curiosity, exploration, and learning throughout early development using a combination of behavioral and computational methods.
Knight Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Robert Knight
Research focuses on attention and memory; neuropsychology and physiology; cognitive neuroscience.
Kriegsfeld Neurobiology Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Lance Kriegsfeld
The broad goal of the research in this lab is to understand the genetic, cellular, and hormonal mechanisms responsible for the temporal control of motivated behaviors and their underlying physiology.
Language and Cognition Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Terry Regier
This lab investigates the relation of language and thought, in computational terms
Language and Cognitive Development Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Mahesh Srinivasan
Compared to other animals, humans are unique in their linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities. Broadly speaking, this lab explores how these abilities develop and interact in children, as a way of addressing the question of what makes humans special.
Moore Accuracy Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Don Moore
Research focuses include overconfidence—including when people think they are better than they actually are, when people think they are better than others, and when they are too sure they know the truth. Investigates forecasting, judgment, and decision making.
Neuroeconomics Laboratory
Affiliated Faculty: Ming Hsu
Economic decision-making involves choices ranging from weighty ones such as purchasing a home to routine ones such as grocery shopping. An understanding of the biological basis of consumer choice is important not only scientifically, but also clinically due to disruptions of decision-making processes in neuropsychiatric disorders. In this lab, they study these questions by combining ideas and tools from neuroscience, economics, psychology, and marketing. The goals of their research involves characterizing the underlying neural systems as well as molecular and genetic mechanisms.
Perceptual Reality Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Emily Cooper
This is a vision science research lab that examines the principles underlying visual perception, with applications to both basic and translational questions.
Redwood Center
Affiliated Faculty: Michael DeWeese & Bruno Olshausen
The Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience is a research center home to faculty, postdocs, and students who are working on theories of computation in the brain. Modern neuroscience has at its disposal many new tools for measuring brain activity, but far fewer tools for understanding these measurements in a larger theory of brain function. Their aim is to supply useful algorithms, statistical analysis, and theoretical ideas to both analyze measurements and guide further experimentation.
Social and Moral Judgment Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Clayton Critcher
The SOMO lab conducts behavioral science experiments to understand how people make social and morally relevant judgments and decisions in a variety of everyday contexts.
Theunissen Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Frédéric Theunissen
The long term goal of the research in the laboratory is to understand the neural computations that underlie auditory perception with a focus on how the brain of animals and humans decipher behaviorally relevant sounds and, in particular, vocalizations used in communication. They believe that the neural representation of sound, the major auditory perceptual dimensions (pitch, timbre, rhythm) and the statistics of natural sounds are intertwined and that understanding this 3-way relationship is critical for explaining audition. Their research approach is multifaceted and interdisciplinary; they combine animal behavior, human psychophysics, sensory neurophysiology and theoretical and computational neuroscience.
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP)
Affiliated Faculty: Dacher Keltner & David Presti
BCSP will leverage UC Berkeley’s strengths in basic neuroscience, psychology, and molecular biology to conduct studies to help elucidate the mechanistic bases of the actions of psychedelics and subjective psychedelic experiences, as well as their enduring effects.
Whitney Lab
Affiliated Faculty: David Whitney
Using both psychophysical and neuroimaging techniques, this lab studies visual, auditory, and visuomotor localization, with the goal of understanding the perceptual, cognitive, and neural mechanisms that allow humans to perceive and interact with objects in a dynamic world.
Wilbrecht Lab
Affiliated Faculty: Linda Wilbrecht
The frontal regions of the neocortex show protracted development in mammals. While dendritic spines are pruned in the frontal neocortex in adolescence there is also late growth of new local and long range connections. This lab is interested in understanding the function of these changes and their impact on learning and decision making.