Join our group!

Join as a doctoral researcher

If you have a Master degree and would like to do a PhD, please take a look at how to apply to the PhD program of the Department of Cognitive Science, which offers 5 PhD stipends per year. Please note that applicants are required to submit a research proposal. 


Join as an intern or a visiting student

We are happy to host Master students who want to do their internship with us and doctoral researchers wishing to cooperate on a project with us.


Check our Team Handbook

It should give you an idea of how we work and organise our research group activities.

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Internships will involve helping with running one or more experiment together with a doctoral researcher. Please check the research done at the ACES and the associated contact person.

For supervision of Master thesis, please contact Christophe Heintz.

Possible projects for interns and vising students also include:

Promises and deniability

Are promises taken more seriously than assertions?

The proposed study will investigate whether implied promises are less easily deniable than implied assertions. We hypothesise that different speech act do not differ in terms of interpretation process and commitment attribution, but they often entail stronger reliance.

The project will include developing the stimuli, implementing the study on an online platform (such as Qualtrics) and analysing the data. We aim to write a short report on the basis of this study.

Coordination and team reasoning

There are cases where it is better to coordinate on one set of action rather than another. For instance, two people living in Vienna are both better off coordinating on a meeting place in Vienna than in a far away city. While such cases of decision making seem extremely simple and natural, the underlying psychological processes might involve mechanisms especially dedicated to group decision making.

We have designed some tasks meant to test theories of group decision making in situations where there is a need for coordination. The project will include refining the experimental protocol, running the experiment, doing the analysis and co-authoring a paper.

The mathematics of cultural evolution

Why are some ideas and practices successfully maintained in a community, in such a way that they constitute cultural phenomena?

According to Cultural Attraction Theory, cultural phenomena result from the existence of ‘factors of attraction’. In this study, we show how to demonstrate the existence of factors of attraction with a ‘toy example’ of cultural transmission.

The task first consists in gathering data via the Locating Game and then contribute to the mathematical analysis.

Programming skills are highly desirable for this task.