Psychology: Cognitive PhD

The Cognitive Psychology PhD program offers an exceptional, research-intensive training environment for students interested in understanding how the mind works. The program faculty are nationally and internationally known for innovative research on sentence comprehension and discourse, speech and language perception, word recognition and lexical access, animal cognition, auditory perception, categorization, learning, and motor control. The program is for individuals who aim to become independent research scientists in cognitive psychology, primarily (but not limited to) in the context of academic careers.

Requirements

A minimum of 72 credit hours, including core cognitive coursework, electives and departmental breadth requirements.
Completion of a pre-dissertation project with your primary advisor. The pre-dissertation project culminates in a written report of an empirical project that is of publishable quality in an academic journal.
Completion of a qualifying project with a mentor other than your primary advisor. The project must be a publishable-quality empirical project or a computational project.
Yearly presentation of ongoing research in the cognitive area’s BrownBag talk series.
Doctoral dissertation and oral defense of the dissertation.

Curriculum

Required Core (9 credits)

PSY 607LEC - Adv Statistics Methods 1 Credits: 3
PSY 608SEM - Adv Statistics Methods 2 Credits: 3
PSY 639SEM - Cognitive Processes Credits: 3

Distribution Courses (6 credits)

Students choose 2 courses (1 from each of two areas outside of student’s program of study):

Elective Courses (20-42 credits)

PSY XXX or other Social Sciences field - Any graduate level courses related to the Cognitive Psychology discipline, as determined by student’s academic advisor.

Additional Requirements (3-36 credits)

PSY 600
- Qualifying project #1 - Learned Research Skill (e.g. learning a programming lang. or a publishable lit. review) - up to 12 credits
- Qualifying project #2 - Publishable Empirical Project - up to 12 credits
- Pre-dissertation Project - up to 12 credits

Culminating Experience (1-12 credits)

PSY 700TUT - Thesis Guidance Credits: 1 - 12

Faculty Mentorship and Supervision

Our program fosters collegial and intellectually stimulating interactions between students and faculty, in order to prepare students to become the next generation of cognitive scientists. The graduate student’s primary faculty contact is with his or her mentor, however, our program is designed to facilitate interaction with a broad range of faculty members outside classes. Students form an Individualized Mentoring Committee in the first year, which is a committee of three faculty members: the advisor and two others (one of whom must be from the cognitive area). In addition, students complete a project that is mentored by faculty members other than the primary advisor (these are termed Qualifying Projects).

Faculty Directory

Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs)

1) Students will acquire and demonstrate knowledge and skills necessary to plan, conduct, evaluate, and disseminate research in areas relevant to cognitive psychology. This includes competence in critical review and evaluation of the current corpus of knowledge available on the problem of interest, statistics and research methods, planning and conducting increasingly independent theoretical and empirical research, and disseminating the results of their work to the profession and broader community.

2) Students will acquire and demonstrate knowledge and skills relevant to the theory and research in cognitive psychology. Students will demonstrate knowledge of modern scientific approaches to research on human and animal information processing, they will demonstrate knowledge in specialized areas of cognitive psychology, and they will demonstrate understanding of ethics and professional issues.

3) Students will acquire and demonstrate a broad knowledge of psychology and demonstrate an ability to integrate these areas with cognitive psychology. Students will obtain knowledge of and an appreciation of diverse areas of psychology.

4) Students will acquire knowledge and skills necessary to conduct themselves professionally and to prepare for careers in cognitive science and are expected to participate in professional activities at the department, university, community, and professional levels.

SED Statement

This program is officially registered with the New York State Education Department (SED).