PhD Candidate: Computational/Cognitive Neuroscience at the Predictive Brain Lab of the Donders...

The last decade has witnessed a paradigm shift in how we view perception and cognition. Brains are increasingly thought of as prediction machines. Join the collaborative and supportive work environment of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging as a PhD candidate to work on this exciting hypothesis. In this research project, you will capitalise on recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), providing a richer and more computationally explicit test of predictive coding in perception.

Recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning have put artificial neural networks firmly on the map as a promising approach to both model and understand biological brains. This PhD project aims to harness the recent progress in AI to build computationally explicit models (Artificial Neural Networks, ANNs) that embody the principles of predictive coding. The ultimate goal is to better understand the neural mechanisms underlying our remarkable perceptual abilities by comparing artificial and biological networks, in terms of neural and behavioural representations during naturalistic perceptual conditions.

As a PhD candidate you will use a computational approach to model and predict neural responses within the human visual system as well as behavioural performance, and test the neural and behavioural implications of different predictive neural architectures. The experimental and computational work will be conducted at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands). You will be supervised by a team of computational and cognitive neuroscientists with complementary expertise: Prof. Floris de Lange, Dr Micha Heilbron and Dr Lea-Maria Schmitt. You will be an active team member of the Predictive Brain Lab , a research group examining how the brain combines prior knowledge and incoming information to generate perceptual experience and make decisions.