[Jobs] 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
constanti...@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/16347f6e665376fd9a9a290dbfe0db5b-Abstract-Conference.html
- 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/4e55139e019a58e0084f194f758ffdea-Abstract.html
- 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