While much of logic and linguistics is traditionally considered abstract and normative, far removed from everyday reasoning concerns, there is the reality of human performance.

Today disciplines such as neurophysiology and cognitive psychology are increasingly concerned with (mainly human) information processing and make great progress in unravelling the underlying psycho-physical mechanisms. These results are of immediate relevance to logic in the broad sense it is conceived of within ILLC. Reversely, insights from logic turn out to be important for cognitive and neurosciences, providing high-level models for cognitive functions, and leading to new questions and insights that even suggest new experimentation at the level of brain processes.

Such links do not just occur with higher cognitive functions. Recent interpretations of logics for nonmonotonic reasoning and belief revision in terms of artificial neural networks allow for logical modelling of subsymbolic processes. This new development may establish the long-needed link between current cognitive science with its emphasis on brain research and the traditional conception of thinking as guided by linguistic structures.

Within ILLC particular attention is paid to the modeling of the learning process. Learning can be seen as gradual transmission of information from a teacher to a learner in the case of a human teacher, and as gradual absorption of information in the case of a learner who grasps regularities in the outside world. As such this theme fits perfectly into ILLC's study of information transfer.