Name: Rafael E. Núñez
Title: Associate Professor, Department of Cognitive Science

Email: rnunez@ucsd.edu

Campus Address: Cognitive Science Building (CSB) 165

Phone: (858) 822-5253

Education: Ph.D., University of Freiburg, Switzerland, 1993

Field of Expertise:
Professor Nunez investigates cognition from the perspective of the embodied mind. His particular interest is in high-level cognitive phenomena such as conceptual systems, abstraction, and inference mechanisms, as they manifest themselves naturally through largely unconscious bodily/mental activity (e.g., gesture production co-produced with conceptual metaphors and blends). His multidisciplinary interests bring me to address these issues from various interrelated perspectives: mathematical cognition, the empirical study of spontaneous gestures, cognitive linguistics, psychological experiments, neuroimaging, and field research investigating spatial construals of time in the Aymara culture of the Andes.

Region of Interest: Andean Region, Chile

Selected Publications:
George Lakoff & Rafael Núñez (2000). Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books.

Núñez, R. and Sweetser, E. "With the Future Behind Them: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the cross linguistic comparison of spatial construals of time." Cognitive Science 30 (2006): 401-45.

Courses:

COGS 1: Introduction to Cognitive Science

COGS 14: Design and Analysis of Experiments

COGS 101C: Language

COGS 152: The Cognitive Science of Mathematics

COGS 155: Gesture and Cognition

COGS 160: Seminar on Special Topics: Gesture and Cognition

COGS 200: Cognitive Science Seminar: Gesture and Cognition

COGS 205 A-B: Introduction to Thesis Research

COGS 211 A-B-C: Research Methods in Cognitive Science

COGS 260 Seminar on Special Topics: The Cognitive Science of Mathematics

COGS 260 Seminar on Special Topics: The Nature of Logic - Philosophical and Cognitive Perspectives (co-taught with PHIL 285)

COGS 260: Seminar on Special Topics: Current Controversies on Conceptual Mappings: Theoretical and Methodological Isuues (with Prof. Gilles Fauconnier)