Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies

The Center for Cognitive Studies was founded at Harvard in 1960 by Jerome Bruner and George Miller to create an institutional home for interdisciplinary research on mental processes — the first such home in American academic science. The Center brought together psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists at a moment when mainstream psychology departments still resisted the cognitive turn. Its fellows and visitors during the 1960s and 1970s read like a roll-call of cognitive science: Noam Chomsky, George Armitage Miller, Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria, Daniel Kahneman, Roger Brown, and dozens more. The Center dissolved in 1972 but its institutional model — interdisciplinary, theoretically ambitious, oriented toward mental processes rather than behavior — shaped the cognitive science centers that subsequently emerged at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UC San Diego, and elsewhere.