MISSION STATEMENT
Updated November 2017
The Center for the Advancement of Cognitive Science (CFACS) was established to provide a
common environment and vision for budding and established scientists at OU (and affiliated
institutions) from which to tackle, with unprecedented scientific rigor and interdisciplinary fervor,
some of the most fundamental unsolved problems in Cognitive Science and Psychology. To this
end, our core mission is to approach the study of the animal mind and brain with the same kind of
methodological thoroughness and definitional precision that physicists employ in their study of the
physical world: namely, via the development and testing of mathematical and computational
models of behavior and cognition, and via fastidious empirical research. Our second goal is to use
reliable, replicated, robust, and accurate findings from the study of perception, conception, and
memory to try to better understand the nature of phenomena studied in fields such as Ethology,
Affective Psychology, and Clinical Psychology. The ultimate aim is to develop a unified and precise
science of the mind and brain.
Ronaldo Vigo
, Ph.D.
Director
