Cognitive science
The term "cognitive science" was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of Artificial Intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal "Cognitive Science" and the Cognitive Science Society were founded. The founding meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held at the University of California, San Diego in 1979, which resulted in cognitive science becoming an internationally visible enterprise. In 1972, Hampshire College started the first undergraduate education program in Cognitive Science, led by Neil Stillings. In 1982, with assistance from Professor Stillings, Vassar College became the first institution in the world to grant an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science. In 1986, the first Cognitive Science Department in the world was founded at the University of California, San Diego.
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC)
LCHC was originally based at Rockefeller University in New York City from 1971 to 1978 and has been based at the UC San Diego (UCSD) from 1978 to the present. When the LCHC relocated from New York to California, it changed both its university and departmental setting, with its new base of operations now in the Department of Communication. This institutional relocation permitted the LCHC to: 1) expand its research concerns to include the use of new communication technologies in various settings; 2) forge community partnerships in the racially, economically, and politically diverse border-city of San Diego; and 3) situate LCHC research within the discipline of communication studies, for which mediation is a central, constitutive, concept.