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Research in the heart of boston
The Subjectivity Lab is currently looking to recruit a postdoc for 2024. Of course, we are always interested in hearing from talented and enthusiastic prospective lab members even when we are not actively seeking them (e.g., graduate students, undergraduates). Feel free to send Jorge a note if you’re interested in joining our group!
See below for more information.
Postdoctoral Fellows
We are looking to recruit a postdoctoral researcher to join an international, multi-site, multi-year funded project on perception, imagination and consciousness. The project is an adversarial collaboration to pit higher-order theories of consciousness against each other. The project will leverage psychophysics, neuroimaging (fMRI), modeling and machine learning to disentangle the neural correlates of consciousness and their shared codes across perception and imagination. Feel free to get in touch with Jorge if your research interests and experience line up with the lab’s needs. You can read more about the project.
Graduate Students
At the moment it is not clear if we’ll be recruiting grad students for fall 2024. That said, we’re always interesting in hearing from enthusiastic prospective lab members. If your interests strongly align with the lab’s, don’t hesitate sending Jorge an email to get in touch; please include your CV and a few lines saying what kind of research you’ve done in the past and how you see your current interests fitting into one or more of the lab’s lines of research.
Undergrad Research Assistants
Special Project using Eye Tracking and Virtual Reality (VR) to measure conscious awareness is looking for advanced RAs!
We have a special project where we aim to measure conscious awareness by doing pupillometry (the measure of small, but quite meaningful, changes in pupil size). We plan to use advanced eye tracking and virtual reality (VR) equipment that requires intermediate to advanced knowledge of Python. The VR component is simple, but some familiarity with C# and/or Unity could be useful. Experience doing eye tracking or using VR is not necessary, but it would of course be useful. Initially RA-ship can start on a voluntary basis and based on progress and compatibility it can turn into a full-time paid co-op opportunity. Students from all majors and backgrounds are encouraged to apply (e.g. psychology with coding skills, computer science, engineering, etc.).
If you are interested in knowing more about this project and you think you have the required qualifications, please get in touch.
General RA Opportunities
Working in a lab as an undergraduate is a fantastic way to get research experience, which can be useful not only for preparing yourself for the next steps of a career in science, but also finding out whether you enjoy doing research in the first place. More importantly, research is interesting!
Most of our research is done via online experiments. This approach offers fantastic opportunities for research, but it also means that RAs cannot merely “help out” with other tasks that traditionally would have been done in person. At the same time, this opens a fantastic opportunity for self-driven and creative undergraduates: To join our lab you need to lead your own project!
Ideally, you should come to us with a specific scientific question or idea you are intrigued about. This question or idea should be related to the topics we study in our lab: (visual) perception, consciousness, or introspection. Don’t worry if you don’t know specifically how you’d test your question, we can help with that (but if you have specific ideas of how to implement things out, we’d love to hear them!).
As you may tell, this is not the kind of RA position where you would be one small cog in a big machine. For this reason, we are interested in especially dedicated undergraduates who can devote at least 8 hours or more per week to research in the lab. You should also expect to lead your own project, which requires dedication and having or developing technical expertise. Initially RAs start on a part-time volunteer basis. Funding and compatibility permitting, you may also become a full-time co-op student (if you have work-study financial aid you may be eligible for co-op funding too).
Ideally, a research assistant in our lab would:
(1) be excited about cognitive science in general, and the topics we study such as visual perception, consciousness and introspection, in particular;
(2) have some basic familiarity with research methods in psychology (no prior research experience is required though); and
(3) be very comfortable working with computers (including spreadsheets, graphics programs, etc.); some familiarity with computer programming (e.g., HTML/CSS/JS, Matlab or Python) is ideal. It’s ok if you don’t know how to code, but then part of you joining the lab is that you learn how to code your own experiments (typically in HTML/CSS/JS, but Python (e.g. PsychoPy) or Matlab may be useful too). Learning how to code is easier than you think, but most people stop trying early on because of the learning curve. Coding can be fun and we have set up a coding challenge to help you teach yourself how to code if you don’t know yet (more about the challenge below).
If you are interested in joining our lab, you should e-mail us with answers to the following questions:
- Do you have any experience with computer programming? If yes, what languages and at what level. If not and you’re willing to learn, please create a GitHub account and send us your user name so that we can add you to the coding challenge. There you’ll find resources and a self-paced challenge, to help you learn to code in HTML/CSS/JS.
- How many hours a week can you commit to working in the lab? For how long can you commit to volunteer (e.g., a semester, a summer, a year)?
- Why are you interested in getting research experience?
- What interests you have about psychology, perception and consciousness? Broadly speaking, what would you like to study here in the lab? To answer this question, you could share a thought about one of our recent papers, or even propose a new study (whether based off a paper you read, or just out of the blue!).
Note that we are interested in having all sorts of students with different skills / backgrounds / experience. Even (or especially!) if you’re a first year student with no experience in a lab, we want to hear from you!
Other Visitors
We are also happy to consider other types of visitors to the lab. For example, we may be able to host short-term (a few months) or long-term (e.g., 1 year) visits. Though we do not currently have funding for such positions, visitors of this sort can often become official members of our department during their visits, and we may even be able to fund the research they conduct (e.g., the costs associated with subjects and equipment). People in the Boston area who want to join our lab meetings are also welcome. Visitors may also come from areas other than psychology and neuroscience. We would love to have an in-house philosopher or computer scientist!
If this kind of visit sounds right to you, please feel free to send Jorge a note!
