A Institutional National Research Service Award (NRSA) was awarded to the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) for support of an interdisciplinary training program in Cognitive Science at the New Brunswick Campus. This document provides some background information on the Center, its human and physical resources, and its record of providing research training. Central to our plan for training graduate students in Cognitive Science is the recently established Certificate in Cognitive Science which is described below. In addition, this document will provide pointers to the research themes that characterize the Center and will describe the unique tradition of cross-disciplinary collaboration and training that characterizes Rutgers' approach to Cognitive Science. We will also document the strong commitment that Rutgers University has made to the Center and to Cognitive Science at this University.

A primary goal of RuCCS is to foster research that investigates the nature of intelligent information processing. The approach in cognitive science, in contrast with the approach taken by other investigators interested in similar issues, is essentially computational. The goal is to understand such aspects of intelligent performance as perception, language processing, planning, problem solving, reasoning, and learning, in terms of the computational processes that underlie these skills, as well as the computational mechanisms (be they silicon hardware or neural tissue) that may instantiate them. The pursuit is essentially multidisciplinary and involves techniques and knowledge drawn from experimental psychology, computer science, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and engineering. The multidisciplinary nature of the research goes much deeper in cognitive science than in many other interdisciplinary fields. Because both the content and the techniques used in such investigations come from such a wide diversity of sources, it is difficult to anticipate which of the contributing disciplines will provide the critical insight for particular research problems. For this reason, the Center provides the organization and the facilities to enable researchers to interact fully and freely with each other, as well as with other external researchers and industrial research laboratories.

The Center coordinates research activities in cognitive science throughout the University. Although it does not grant degrees, it is responsible for running the Certificate Program in Cognitive Science, which was approved in the spring of 1994. Every faculty member who is part of RuCCS also holds a joint appointment in an academic department and in one or more graduate programs. As a result, members of the Center carry out teaching and graduate research supervision, both for the departments in which they have joint appointments and as part of the Certificate Program itself. A brief description of the Center is contained in the home page About RuCCS.

The Center for Cognitive Science was founded in October 1991 and was given adequate funding commitments by the university to hire the people currently on its faculty, as well as an operating budget, equipment startup funds, and new space sufficient for the new faculty. At present the human resource complement is 16 faculty members (5 in Psychology, 4 in Computer Science, 3 in Philosophy, and 4 in Linguistics) who are budgeted partly through the Center, and a staff of 5 people, including an assistant director, a secretary, a full-time systems administrator, a systems programmer, and several part-time assistants.

Rutgers University initiated the Center for Cognitive Science because it was, and continues to be, persuaded that the interdisciplinary study of Cognitive Science is an important science of the future. The University’s official strategic plan "Building on Excellence" (1994) notes that

"Rutgers-New Brunswick is in a good position to become one of the leading centers for research in the field. The new Center for Cognitive Science is ready to build on recent developments in areas such as philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology and to assemble an outstanding interdisciplinary team."

A significant feature of the Center for Cognitive Science and the Training Program in Cognitive Science is the degree of commitment that Rutgers University has made to these ventures. In setting up the Center, the administration provided an adequate operating budget, professional personnel, and made a number of commitments to ensure its future growth. In addition to a full-time Director and Associate Director (both of whom are tenured members of the Faculty), the Center has a highly qualified full-time professional administrator and business manager in the position of Assistant Director (Sue Cosentino), a full-time secretary (Carol Esso), two full-time Systems Administrator/Programmers (Akos Feher, Peter Berenyi). The Cognitive Development Laboratory (under Alan Leslie’s direction) has a full-time Research Assistant provided by the Center, and the Laboratory of Vision Research also has professional systems people whom we have drawn on for support.

The RuCCS permanent budget also has provisions for at least one visiting faculty member each year and 6 post-doctoral fellows, and four or more NRSA Graduate Training Fellowships provided through a combination of NIH and University funds.

Because RuCCS currently shares joint faculty appointments with the Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology Departments, at the present time these are the principal departments contributing to the study of cognitive science. However, there is also strong participation by the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies. In addition, we have had excellent cooperation in joint research and teaching functions by members of a number of research groups and laboratories on the New Brunswick Campus. These, include the Laboratory of Vision Research, the Center for Computer Aids for Industrial Productivity (CAIP), the Center for Math Science and Computer Education, as well as several groups in the Mathematics and Electrical Engineering departments which have strong interests in aspects of computational architecture and neural networks, and in the Departments of Neuroscience and Cell Biology and Neurology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, with whom we share an interest in the neural basis of such cognitive functions as language.

Over the past 3 years of the Center's existence it has sponsored a number of events designed to maintain contact with the international research community and to provide graduate students with an international perspective on research. The Center has regularly been involved in running joint workshops with other local institutions. We helped organize a continuing joint Princeton-Columbia-Rutgers mini-symposium on Cognitive Science, which rotated several times each year among the three institutions. We participated in and helped organize or sponsor a variety of conferences/workshops, such as the Fourth Workshop on Empirical Studies of the Programmers; the 1998 CUNY conference on "Sentence Processing"; two major NEH Summer Institutes on Philosophy of Mind and on Problems of Meaning, organized by RuCCS members Ernest Lepore and Jerry Fodor; and the Eleventh International Conference on Machine Learning, organized by RuCCS associate Haym Hirsh. We have also been the recipients of a number of internal "strategic initiative" awards which helped to establish a laboratory for language and cognition and a laboratory for Human-machine Interaction, and are part of in initiative in digital library research (the Rutgers Distributed laboratory for Digital Libraries).

Consistent with its mandate to promote interdisciplinary activity, the Center sponsored a major workshop on a theoretical approach to certain problems of linguistic form (Optimality Theory), that was developed here at RuCCS by Alan Prince (with collaborators Jane Grimshaw, Linguistics and RuCCS, Rutgers U.; Paul Smolensky, Computer Science, Johns Hopkins U.; and John McCarthy, Linguistics, U. Massachusetts). The first international workshop on this theory (Rutgers Optimality Workshop -- ROW-1) brought together 100 linguists and cognitive scientists from the US, Canada and the UK. RuCCS is now also the electronic repository of papers on this subject. Scholars around the world have used anonymous FTP to retrieve over 50 reports and a 100-item bibliography from the Optimality Archive.

We have had a significant number of visitors funded by the Center. They have spent from several weeks to a year in residence, giving graduate seminars in their field of specialization, and presenting research colloquia. Professor Jacques Mehler of L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes and CNRS in Paris spent a term each year for three consecutive years giving courses and/or lectures at RuCCS. Professors Jose Garcia-Albea of the U. Madrid, Edson Francoso of the U. Campinas in Brazil, Diane Bradley of Monash U. in Australia, and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini of MIT (now at Milan) each spent a term or more at the Center. David Swinney, now at UCSD, had a part-time appointment at RuCCS from its beginning in 1991 until 1993. In 1993/1994, the Center had several visiting faculty including Professor Jacques Mehler who was a visiting professor and his Doctoral student Christophe Pallier; Dr. Jean-Louise Dessalles of L'Ecole Nationale Superiore des Telecomunications; Dr. Emanuel Dupoux from CNRS in Paris; Dr. Brian Fisher who was a Research Scientist and Dr. Stacy Marsella who was a Post-Doctoral Fellow. In 1995 we hosted visiting scholars Paolo Merlo from U. Geneva, Tim German from the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in London, Bruce Tesar from the U. Colorado, and Paul Smolensky from Johns Hopkins U.

In addition to the visiting scholars, the Center also sponsored several distinguished lecture series. The major lecture series was the RuCCS Colloquium Series and the others were joint series on special topics of interest to RuCCS researchers, the main one of which was the Series on Human and Machine Vision (funded by RuCCS but co-sponsored by the Laboratory of Vision Research, the CAIP Center, Biomedical Engineering, Psychology and Computer Science). For the past two years the Colloquia speakers included: Stanislas Dehaene, I.N.S.E.R.M., Paris; Alan Mackworth, UBC; Steven Pinker, MIT; Ray Reiter, U. Toronto; Anne Treisman, Princeton U.; Elizabeth Spelke, Cornell U.; Robert Frank, U. Delaware; Michael Tarr, Yale U.; Daniel Kahnemann, Princeton U.; Dianne Bradley, CUNY; Robin Clark, U. Pennsylvania; Allan Jepson, U. Toronto; James Higginbotham, Oxford; Alexander Pentland, MIT; Jacques Mehler, Ecole des Hautes Etudes des Sciences Sociales; Edward Gibson, MIT; Richard Lewis, Princeton U. In addition, our series on Human and Machine Vision this year included: Daphna Weinshall (Hebrew U., Jerusalem), Qasim Zaidi (The Lighthouse, NYC), Rick Wildes (SRI-David Sarnoff Research Center), Leonard Matin (Columbia U.), James McGowan (Rutgers U.), John Tsotsos (U. Toronto), Alan Gilchrist (Rutgers U. - Newark), Peter Meer (CAIP, Rutgers U.), and Dana Ballard (U. Rochester), Christos Faloutsos (U. Maryland), Yaser Yacob (U. Maryland), Ralph Siegel (Rutgers U. - Newark), and Ronen Basri (Weizmann Institue, Israel).

Visitors and members of RuCCS have been encouraged to give a variety of courses to increase graduate students' awareness of cross-disciplinary problems and approaches in cognitive science, and to increase the interest in cognitive science among researchers on campus. Most of these seminars have been available for students to take for credit, although a few were given as non-credit "mini-courses". They continue to be a regular feature of graduate training in cognitive science at RuCCS.

Over the past three years we have had several seminars on Psycholinguistics and Early Language Development given by our visitor Jacques Mehler; a seminar on Psycholinguistics given by David Swinney; a seminar on Visual Attention and Indexing Theory given by Zenon Pylyshyn; a seminar on Moral Development given jointly by Jacques Mehler and Stephen Stich; a seminar on Evolutionary Psychology given by Stephen Stich; a seminar on Limited Rationality given by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini (which led to the publication of a best-selling book in Italian, recently translated into English as "Inevitable Illusions"); seminars by Karin Stromswold on Neurolinguistics and Language Acquisition; a joint seminar between RuCCS and the clinical program at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology on Foundations of Psychopathology and Psychotherapy given by Stephen Stich, Terry Wilson and Robert Woolfolk; a joint Rutgers-U. Pennsylvania seminar on Psychological and Linguistic issues of the Lexicon (given by Lila Gleitman and Jane Grimshaw); and a mini-course on Theories of Concepts given by Jerry Fodor. In the future we plan to continue this process with the involvement of our visitors and Post-Doctoral Fellows.

RuCCS maintains a technical report series reports written by members of the Center. These reports, along with a large number of reports on Optimality Theory, are available in hard copy at cost to researchers and are also available free by computer network on-line over anonymous FTP and through the World Wide Web. This is part of the Center's effort to communicate to the research community (as well as to potential graduate students) through the Internet using the World Wide Web protocol. In this way we provide reports and a detailed description of the Center's activities, the Cognitive Science Certificate Program, and a summary of the research being carried out by RuCCS faculty. These reports are available over the Web http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/publications.html.

Rutgers' training program in Cognitive Science is embodied in its Certificate Program. Instead of offering a degree in Cognitive Science, we deliberately designed our training program so that students would obtain their degree from an existing department, and have that department as their primary affiliation for official purposes. At the same time, a student interested in Cognitive Science would have a formal advisory structure, a community (of students and faculty) to identify with, and a way for the University to formally recognize that the student has completed courses and research beyond that required of the degree program.

The goal of the Cognitive Science Certificate Program is to provide a structured way for students enrolled in various graduate programs to study and carry out research in Cognitive Science with guidance from relevant faculty advisors, and to bring interested students from different departments together in a graduate student community integrated into the general university research community.

The structure of the Certificate Program emerged after extensive consultation with participating departments and has the full endorsement of those departments, as well as the Rutger-New Brunswick Graduate School, which formally approved it last spring. The details are spelled out in Appendix D. Students admitted into the Certificate Program must first be admitted into a participating Graduate Program at Rutgers and must meet qualifications for a PhD in those programs (Table 4 shows the requirements placed on students by each participating department), as well as the requirements of the Certificate Program.

The first of the Certificate Program requirements (which need not be met in the first year of graduate study) is to obtain credit in the Proseminar in Cognitive Science (course number 16:185:500). The proseminar is designed to introduce students to the basic issues in the field (both empirical and theoretical-conceptual), and to provide students with a basic common vocabulary to discuss these issues. A second but equally important purpose is to allow students from many different departments to meet one another and begin to form a community. As part of the requirements of the Proseminar, students attend and actively participate in a year-long graduate student talk series. Faculty also attend the graduate student talk series, and students are not graded on their work in this series. The main reason for the series is to help create a community of students who share an interest in cognitive science and to share their research with one another.

The second Certificate Program requirement is that students must complete a supervised research project in an area of cognitive science that typically would not be included in their disciplinary specialization. The advisor for the research project is subject to the approval of the Certificate Committee. Course number 16:185:699 is assigned to this outside research project.

The third Certificate Program requirement is that students must take three courses from an approved palette of courses outside their primary department, as determined by the Certificate Committee. The palette also includes special interdisciplinary Cognitive Science courses given by members of the Center and Center visitors. These receive Cognitive Science course numbers 16:185:600 & 601.

The three major themes that characterize research at RuCCS are: Vision (including early and late vision and visual attention); Natural Language Structure, Analysis and Learning; and Theoretical Scholarship concerning the nativism-empiricism issue, Cognitive Architecture (including modularity and cognitive penetrability). For more on these themes visit the home pages of RuCCS faculty or visit http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/NRSA-themes.html

For more detailed guidlines concerning eligibility for NRSA pre- and Post-Doctoral Fellowships see the NIH page for the NRSA Fellowships at: NIH Guidelines.