Cognitive Systems Research is dedicated to the study of human-level cognition. As such, it welcomes papers which advance the understanding, design and applications of cognitive and intelligent systems, both natural and artificial.

The journal brings together a broad community studying cognition in its many facets in vivo and in silico, across the developmental spectrum, focusing on individual capacities or on entire architectures. It aims to foster debate and integrate ideas, concepts, constructs, theories, models and techniques from across different disciplines and different perspectives on human-level cognition. The scope of interest includes the study of cognitive capacities and architectures - both brain-inspired and non-brain-inspired - and the application of cognitive systems to real-world problems as far as it offers insights relevant for the understanding of cognition.

Cognitive Systems Research therefore welcomes mature and cutting-edge research approaching cognition from a systems-oriented perspective, both theoretical and empirically-informed, in the form of original manuscripts, short communications, opinion articles, systematic reviews, and topical survey articles from the fields of Cognitive Science (including Philosophy of Cognitive Science), Artificial Intelligence/Computer Science, Cognitive Robotics, Developmental Science, Psychology, and Neuroscience and Neuromorphic Engineering. Empirical studies will be considered if they are supplemented by theoretical analyses and contributions to theory development and/or computational modelling studies. Note that the journal does not publish clinical and medical papers. We also do not publish pure machine learning papers, e.g. studies proposing variants of classifiers or pure algorithmic improvements that bear no connection to cognitive systems research in the sense above.

Additionally, Cognitive Systems Research plays a special role in fostering and promoting the 'BICA Challenge' to create a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind by devoting two special issues to BICA AI (Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Intelligence) related topics each year.