Because there are no traditional qualifiers, students become engaged in research from the beginning of their first semester in the program. Students work closely with individual faculty as well as teams of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students whose research interests include computational cognitive modeling, artificial intelligence, extreme expertise, human and machine reasoning, computational linguistics, perception and action, theoretical neuroscience, cognitive robotics, cognitive engineering, and advanced synthetic characters. There is a strong emphasis on building models of natural and artificial cognitive systems using formal, quantitative, and mathematical tools. The department has excellent research facilities, such as eye tracking equipment, an array of robotics equipment, and a large-scale immersive virtual environment lab.