Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We have a simple thesis: the relationship between academic and industry-based cognitive science is broken, but can be fixed. Over the last few decades, there has been a huge increase in the representation of cognitive science in industry. Beyond just machine learning, businesses are increasingly interested in human behavior and cognitive processes. Large proportions of our Ph.D. students, post-docs, and even faculty choose to go through a largely one-way door to corporate jobs in data science, behavioral experimentation, machine learning, user experience, and elsewhere. Currently, people who choose industry careers often lose their social and intellectual networks and their ability to return to tenure-track positions. Valuable insights from industry about memory, decision-making, learning, emotion, distributed cognition, and much more never return to the academic community. We believe that deep, theory driven, theory building work is being done in industry settings–and that the rift between communities makes all our work less effective