Open Positions

Across eleven projects, scientists in the second cohort of the RTG 2906 will investigate the neuropsychological, biological, and computational underpinnings of curiosity. The network comprises a highly interdisciplinary consortium of psychologists, biologists as well as systems and computational neuroscientists who will work together to answer three broad research questions: (A) When are we curious? (B) Why are we curious? and (C) How are we curious? Please note that we do not advertise all the positions simultaneously, so please consult this homepage frequently.

• Project A1: Developmental interplay of curiosity, meta-cognition and social learning job ad, deadline: February 20, 2026
• Project A2: Active acquisition of ecological and social information in wild macaques job ad, deadline: December 20, 2025
• Project A3: Predictors of curiosity in Guinea baboons job ad, deadline: January 15, 2026
• Project A4: To know or not to know – emotional, motivational and person-related factors of seeking or avoiding information job ad, deadline: January 15, 2026
• Project B1: How does curiosity modulate the integration of sampled external information into internal models of the world? job ad, deadline: March 15, 2026
• Project B2: Social and fitness benefits of curiosity in nonhuman primates job ad, deadline: January 15, 2026
• Project B3: Curiosity-driven learning in children’s reading behaviour and knowledge acquisition job ad, deadline: January 31, 2026
• Project B4: Is there a curiosity boost in early category learning? job ad, deadline: January 31, 2026
• Project C3: The mechanistics of local-learning rules for curiosity in neural network models job ad, deadline: February 15, 2026
• Project C5: Information theoretic models of curiosity in hierarchical models of the world job ad, deadline: January 31, 2026

RTG 2906 is hosting an online information event to ensure that students from more diverse backgrounds have all the support they may need during the application process. This information event (touched upon already in answer to many of the preceding questions), will take the form of a drop-in session where RTG 2906 representatives will be on hand to answer all of your queries, large or small. The session will take place on December 10th, 1 pm to 2:30 pm CET.Everyone is welcome to join, but to be able to judge interest in advance and be able to provide you with a link to the event, we kindly ask you to register here.

Do you have any questions? We have compiled answers to the most common questions in a single file. PhD FAQ can be downloaded here.