PhD Candidate: Neurocognitive Mechanism Underlying Social Interaction Effects on Infant Attention at the Donders Centre for Cognition

How does social interaction help infants pay attention? To help answer that question, join the collaborative and supportive work environment of the Donders Centre for Cognition as a PhD candidate. You will be able to develop your skills and learn new things by examining the mechanism underlying social interaction effects on the development of attention in infants.

This PhD project will examine the mechanism underlying social interaction effects on the development of attention in infants. We will study cognitive and brain processes using a combination of EEG and computational modelling, and we will examine how caregivers’ speech and actions support their infants’ attention during play. 

This PhD project focuses on the question of how social interaction early in life can shape infants’ attention development. We will use a unique combination of methods such as looking measures, motion-tracking, infant EEG, and computational modelling to better understand infant-caregiver interactions and their role for infants’ attention. As PhD candidate you will use a combined cognitive (neuro-)science and developmental science approach and implement techniques such as infant EEG, computational modelling, and motion-tracking to address your research questions. The experimental work will be conducted at the

Baby and Child Research Center

(BRC) and

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour

at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands). You will be supervised by a team of scientists with complementary expertise:

Dr Marlene Meyer

(developmental cognitive neuroscience, main supervisor),

Prof Sabine Hunnius

(developmental psychology),

Prof Judith Holler

(multimodal communication and social interaction),

Dr Max Hinne

(computational modelling, artificial intelligence) and external collaborator

Prof Sam Wass

(attention development). You will be an active team member of the

BabyBRAIN lab

, a research group examining the developmental mechanisms and neurocognitive changes underlying early social and cognitive development.

You will have the opportunity to gain experience in academic teaching (10% of the appointment).