Cognitive Science became a self-identified research program with its own Society and Journal in the late 1970s. By the late 1980s, teaching and research programs were becoming fairly common in the United States and England. The very well-known UCSD program began, for example, in 1987. Interest in this interdisciplinary study of the mind and the brain was increasing dramatically.
At about this time, conversations began about creating a Cognitive Science program at Carleton. What made Carleton a more plausible candidate to begin this work than most other universities in Canada is that we had interested faculty members from each of the four departments usually considered the core of cognitive research. The four units were Psychology, the Linguistics part of SLALS, Philosophy and the Artificial Intelligence researchers in School of Computer Science. The seven initial faculty were Chris Herdman and Bill Petrusic (Psychology), Ann Laubstein and Helmut Zobl (Linguistics), Jean-Pierre Corriveau and Franz Oppacher (Computer Science), and Andrew Brook (Philosophy).
2017: Dr. Olessia Jouravlev joined the Institute. Dr. Jouravlev does work in the cognitive neuroscience of language.
2020: The Institute was renamed the Department of Cognitive Science.
2021: Dr. John Anderson and Dr. Mary Kelly joined the Department. Dr. Anderson does research in the area of cognitive aging. He was appointed as a Tier II CRC Chair. Dr. Kelly, a Ph.D. graduate from the program, does work on cognitive architectures.