Brain and Cognitive Science

The Ph.D. program in Brain and Cognitive Science at the University of Southern California provides comprehensive training for students interested in understanding cognition, decision-making, language, memory, emotion, and music perception in terms of underlying neural mechanisms, computational models, and behavior. Our faculty bring world-renowned expertise across a broad range of empirical and computational domains—including reinforcement learning, large language models, neuroimaging, and agentic simulations. We prepare our graduates to be at the forefront of knowledge creation at the dynamic intersection of psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and computational language sciences.