Job ID: 112360

Postdoctoral position in experimental psychology

Position: Post-doctoral Position

Deadline: 31 July 2023

Employment Start Date: 1 December 2023

Contract Length: 2 years

City: Copenhagen

Country: Denmark

Institution: University of Copenhagen

Department: Department of Psychology

Description:

See full call and application form here: https://employment.ku.dk/faculty/?show=159329

The postdoc will be part of a project entitled Selection in Cognition funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and headed by Professor Søren Kyllingsbæk and Associate Professor Thor Grünbaum. Applicants are asked to situate and develop their research plan within the framework of the Selection in Cognition project. For more information about the project, please contact Professor Søren Kyllingsbæk, sk@psy.ku.dk.

The larger project develops and tests a new theory of basic cognitive selection mechanisms by combining methods and perspectives from experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, mathematical modelling, and philosophy. The core idea is that selection in cognition may be understood as a biased competition between representations in a stochastic race (Grünbaum, Oren, & Kyllingsbæk, 2021). In a series of experiments, we have consistently shown that tasks-sets are competing biased by their importance and that this selection process is severely capacity limited. We will extend our new experimental procedures and mathematical models to the study of selection in planning and problem-solving. If our conjecture is true, higher-order cognitive processes like task selection, planning, and problem-solving depend on the same type of selection.

The postdoc should be a researcher with a strong background in experimental psychology and/or cognitive modelling. During the employment, the candidate is expected to engage in the development of new experimental procedures that will enable us to test our general theory of cognitive selection in the domains of task selection, planning, and problem-solving at both psychological and neurophysiological levels. We aim to use our intention selection paradigm to study task-sets within and between complex hierarchies of task-sets. Focus will be on the development of experimental paradigms that will enable us to test our basic computational model of selection processes in planning and problem-solving.