Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive science has historically been introduced as a multidisciplinary and, sometimes, an interdisciplinary study of the mind. Recent critical views of the field have questioned the foundational core and its multidisciplinary nature by suggesting that psychology has come to dominate cognitive science. As these are actively debated issues, we need further investigations. This study examines the degree of overlap between cognitive science and psychological science by comparing article keywords and departmental affiliations of authors extracted from flagship journals over the past decade (2012-2022). The results reveal that over 50% of published authors stem from psychology departments. The topics of study between the two remain quite similar as well. However, network analyses found fragmentation in terms of the methodological approaches and a considerable focus by the community of cognitive scientists on formal modeling. Based on the topics and socio-institutional analysis, we suggest that cognitive science is largely (cognitive) psychology. Implications for the field of cognitive science and its claims of multidisciplinarity are discussed.