[visionlist] Fully funded Postdoc + PhD positions Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) and ERC ACTOR

[Constantin Rothkopf]

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-ecological-neuroscience/) 
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 at 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., & 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/4e55139e019a58e0084f194f758ffdea-Abstract.html 

- 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_c1cad85c077ef907da73774219eb7aed.pdf
- 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