The lab of Constantin Rothkopf (https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/) at the Centre for Cognitive Science @ TU Darmstadt has several open positions at the PhD and Postdoc levels. Research in the laboratory focuses on explaining human sequential visuomotor decisions and behavior under the influence of the world's uncertainties and ambiguities through computational modeling. Using the reverse-engineering approach, we devise algorithms for inferring individuals' internal models of the world, tracking their subjective beliefs over time during behavior and learning, as well as their internal subjective costs and benefits, including effort. We investigate naturalistic sequential tasks, including navigation and object manipulation, active learning and active sensing, sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and intuitive physics. 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. A large-scale tracking lab will be available in 2026. The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) (https://www.simonsfoundation.org/neuroscience/simons-collaboration-on-ecolog...) is an exciting 10-year initiative spanning a powerful international network of labs working across species and disciplines - uniting experimental and computational cognitive science, neuroscience, machine learning, and Al to understand real-world behavior and how it shapes neural representations. The ERC ACTOR aims to utilize both human behavioral experiments and computational modeling to understand human sequential behavior in tasks, including continuous psychophysics, 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 the two Excellence Clusters, “The Adaptive Mind” and “Reasonable AI”, and engage in multiple fruitful research collaborations. Our lab fosters an inclusive, supportive, and collaborative environment driven by scientific curiosity and mutual respect. We maintain close interactions with other research groups, including joint lab meetings. For informal inquiries, please reach out to constantin.rothkopf@tu-darmstadt.de. Please apply through the central application portal at https://www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt/jobs. 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 has recently achieved a top worldwide ranking of attractiveness according to The Economist, and Darmstadt has consistently ranked among the top innovation-driving cities in Germany. Finally, to get a better idea about some of our work, here are some publications by our group: - Kessler, F., Frankenstein, J., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2024). Human navigation strategies and their errors result from dynamic interactions of spatial uncertainties. Nature Communications, 15(1), 5677. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49722-y - Straub, D., Niehues, T. F., Peters, J., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2025). Inverse decision-making using neural amortized Bayesian actors. In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). https://openreview.net/forum?id=zxO4WuVGns - Straub, D., Schultheis, M., Koeppl, H., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2023). Probabilistic inverse optimal control for non-linear partially observable systems disentangles perceptual uncertainty and behavioral costs. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS): 7065-7092. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/hash/16347f6e665376fd9... - 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 (NeurIPS), 9429-9442. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/4e55139e019a58e0084f194f758ff... - 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 - 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 -- Prof. Constantin A. Rothkopf, PhD Technical University of Darmstadt, Alexanderstr. 10, 64283 Darmstadt phone: +49 6151 16-23367 https://tu-darmstadt.zoom-x.de/my/crothkopf Psychology of Information Processing Group https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/ Centre for Cognitive Science http://www.cogsci.tu-darmstadt.de/ Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence https://hessian.ai/ Institute of Psychology https://www.psychologie.tu-darmstadt.de/