mardi 29 janvier 2008

PhD opportunity in animal cognition

Project: The role of stimulus quality in picture-object recognition by pigeons

The Department of Neurobiology and Cognition Research, University of Vienna(http://cognition.univie.ac.at), is seeking to fill a two-year PhD-position in the area of pigeon visual categorization, beginning inFebruary 2008 or as soon as possible thereafter.
The position is part of a new project aimed at investigating various aspects of stimulus quality that may play a role in establishing picture-object equivalence. The experiments will be carried out in parallel to and in close cooperation with those of another research program investigating picture-object recognition, which started last year.
We invite applications from prospective PhD-students who should have completed qualifications equivalent to an Austrian Masters degree. Preferably, we will hire a candidate who will increase the student diversity of our working group and who can be expected to give a freshimpetus to our research in the form of innovative views and ideas. The preferred candidate will have a theoretical background in visual perception and categorization and experience in performing learning experiments with animals. In particular, familiarity with training pigeons in experimental chambers (Skinner-boxes) would be advantageous. Furthermore, reasonable skills in English language arerequired, and some basic competence in statistics is recommended.
The candidates work will be under the supervision of Dr. Ulrike Austand Prof. Dr. Ludwig Huber.
We offer a friendly and interactive environment for sciencific work and the possibility of conducting pigeon research with state-of-the-art infrastructure and excellent computational facilities. Interested students are encouraged to e-mail a letter of motivation and CV to Dr. Ulrike Aust (ulrike.aust@univie.ac.at); these should include astatement of research interests, information on scientific background, and (if available) study results, publication list, and references.