Cognitive Science MSc

An overview of the degree and advice on selecting your courses.

Overview of the degree

Cognitive Science is an exciting and interdisciplinary area bringing together ideas and methods from artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The Cognitive Science degree offers courses in many of these areas, providing a strong grounding in the shared computational and mathematical foundations while also allowing students to pursue specialized courses in their particular interest areas.

Full-time students on this degree must be registered for exactly 180 credit points at all times.  Part-time students have the same course requirements, but spread out over two or three years.

Compulsory courses

The following courses are compulsory:

Information about IPP and Dissertation

Optional courses

In addition, you must register for another 80 credits of optional taught courses, usually split evenly across two semesters. At least 20 credits of these must be chosen from listed Cognitive Science courses, which all have a computational aspect. The rest of your courses will be mainly additional courses in Cognitive Science or in related areas of AI, Philosophy, Psychology, or Language Sciences. You may also choose to do a programming course to build your skills, and up to 20 credits from other areas of Informatics.

This degree offers considerable flexibility in your taught course choices. Specific course options and requirements are listed in your Degree Programme Table, and are built into the Path programme builder, which you can use to help you put together a set of courses that works for yoU.

Degree Programme Tables 

Path programme builder

Course topics and advice on choosing courses

Course topics are groups of related courses to help you navigate our course options. The topics most relevant to this degree are described below.

Programming courses

Before finalizing your other courses, please check the advice on the Programming Courses topic page to see whether you would benefit from taking one of these courses to improve your programming skills.

Programming Courses

Cognitive Science course topics

We recommend that you try to get some depth in one or two of the topics listed below by taking at least two courses in that topic. It's also a good idea to get some breadth in your degree, either by taking a course or two from other topics in this list, or from the closely related topics below.  This will give you some flexibility when it comes to project selection time, since sometimes projects in one particular topic may be oversubscribed. 

Please consider the prerequisites for each course before signing up. Not all students will be prepared for all available courses, but you should be able to find a selection that works for you.  Many (though not all) of the courses in the Cognitive Science topics are less maths- and programming-intensive than other courses in Informatics, but they may require other skills such as writing and reasoning. The individual topic pages often provide some general guidance about this, but check the course descriptors if you're unsure.

For more information about the courses in each topic, follow the links below.

Cognitive Science & Neuroinformatics

Natural Language Processing

Human-Computer Interaction & Design

Closely related topics

Courses in the following topics often have strong links to Cognitive Science and can be a good complement to courses from the Cognitive Science topics. These often have heavier maths and/or programming requirements however.

Computation in Social Systems

Machine Learning

Vision, Robotics & Autonomous Agents

Other topics

You may also choose from other courses in Informatics or other Schools. Most courses taken by our students (including some popular outside courses) are listed in the Topic pages. The complete list of courses offered by the School is in the Sortable Course List.

Full list of Course Topics ( information about most MSc courses, according to topic)

Informatics Sortable Course List ( a compact list of all courses offered this year, sortable by semester, level, credits, etc.)