The lab of Constantin Rothkopf (https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/) at the Centre for Cognitive Science @ TU Darmstadt is looking for PhD and Postdoc applicants interested in becoming part of the ERC project ACTOR. While some positions are focused on human behavioral experiments others are more focused on computational work. The goal of this project is to use both human behavioral experiments and computational modeling to understand human sequential behavior in tasks including continuous psychophysics, visual behaviors such as gaze selection and blinking, sensorimotor control involving intuitive physics, navigation, and food preparation in the framework of sequential decision making/planning/optimal control/RL. Our group is part of the Centre for Cognitive Science and the AI Center at TU Darmstadt, which are home to an internationally outstanding group of PIs and junior researchers working in the areas of computational cognitive science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are part of several research consortia and engage in multiple fruitful research collaborations. The lab has state of the art equipment for eye and body tracking, VR, naturalistic task monitoring, psychophysics and access to one of the most generous computing infrastructures in Germany. We foster an inclusive, supportive, and collaborative environment driven by scientific curiosity and mutual respect and we maintain close interactions with other research groups including joint lab meetings. While some of the positions are geared towards more behavioral work others are strongly focused on computational modeling. Applicants may therefore have a background in computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, engineering, or related fields. Don’t hesitate to contact me for more details. Please send the official application to the dean of the department of human sciences dekanat@humanw.tu-darmstadt.de including a CV, a two page cover letter explaining your research interests, motivation, and your long-term career goals, and contact information for 2-3 references in a single pdf file. The code for the PhD position is “167” and for the Postdoc position “168”. Applications will be reviewed on a continuing basis. The Frankfurt-Darmstadt metropolitan area is located in the heart of Europe and is one of the most international regions in Germany with a diverse community and rich culture repeatedly earning high rankings in worldwide surveys of quality of living. Frankfurt recently reached 7th place worldwide in a ranking of attractiveness by the Economist and Darmstadt has repeatedly ranked among the top innovation driving cities in Germany. Finally, to get a better idea about some of our work, here some publications by our group: - Tatai, F., Straub, D., Rothkopf, C. A. (2023). People use Newtonian physics in intuitive sensorimotor decisions under risk. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 45, No. 45). https://escholarship.org/content/qt0rg3z8f6/qt0rg3z8f6_noSplash_c1cad85c077e... - Kadner, F., Willkomm, H., Ibs, I., & Rothkopf, C. (2023). Finding your Way Out: Planning Strategies in Human Maze-Solving Behavior. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 45, No. 45). https://escholarship.org/content/qt94t1t8kw/qt94t1t8kw_noSplash_3a5e798a923f... - Kessler, F., Frankenstein, J., Rothkopf, C. A. A dynamic Bayesian actor model explains endpoint variability in homing tasks, bioRxiv, 2022. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.09.515854v1 - Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2022). Putting perception into action with inverse optimal control for continuous psychophysics, eLife 11, e76635. https://elifesciences.org/articles/76635 - Schultheis, M., Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2021). Inverse optimal control adapted to the noise characteristics of the human sensorimotor system. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 34, 9429-9442. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/4e55139e019a58e0084f194f758ff... - Neupärtl, N., Tatai, F., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2020). Intuitive physical reasoning about objects’ masses transfers to a visuomotor decision task consistent with Newtonian physics. PLoS computational biology, 16(10), e1007730. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007730 - Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2019). Multi-step planning of eye movements in visual search. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37536-0 - Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2016). Learning rational temporal eye movement strategies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(29), 8332-8337. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601305113 All the best, Constantin Rothkopf https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/ http://www.cogsci.tu-darmstadt.de/ https://hessian.ai/