We form a group of enthusiastic researchers with common interests and a collegial attitude. We meet once a week to discuss papers, share our findings and discuss the problems we inevitably face when formulating hypotheses, designing protocols, and interpreting results.
Check our Team Handbook: it should give you an idea of how we work and organise our activities.
Join as a doctoral researcher
If you have a Master degree and would like to do a PhD at the ACES, please take a look at how to apply to the PhD program of the Department of Cognitive Science:
https://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission
The key poins are:
- The Department of Cognitive Science offers 5 PhD stipends per year. The Doctoral Stipend is 1,880 EUR/gross/month. It is awarded for a period of 48 months in total. It is taxable as PhD students are considered self-employed individuals in Austria.
- The deadline for applying is February 4, 2025, (23:59, Central European Time). You can start your application online whenever you want.
- Applicants are required to submit a research proposal, which plays a very important role in the selection procedure.
- It should be of 1000 to 2000 words (not including the reference list; and you can also add an appendix).
- It should include the research questions, aims and objectives of a research project that is related to the ongoing work in the department. If you want to work at the ACES, it should be related to one of the research themes of the group or to the research interests of Christophe Heintz, who would act as a supervisor. In order to make sure that they could be a fit, do not hesitate to contact him!
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.
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:
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |