PhD Scholarship in Psychology: Motor Processing For Tracking of Others’ Mental States

One fully-funded PhD scholarship is made available through the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden-funded project entitled: “Does the Tracking of Others’ Mental States Depend on Motor Processes? Why Constraining Your Body Limits Your Understanding of Others’ Minds.” Associate Professor Jason Low is the project’s principal investigator. The project is an inter-disciplinary and international effort to investigate the role of motor activity in mentalising, and specifically why freedom to move one’s hands matters for tracking others’ mental states like their beliefs. This project will expose the PhD student to different techniques both experimental and theoretical. The PhD project will involve observing adults watching various scenarios unfold while their hands or feet are constrained or free, correlating their eye gaze, postural sway, movements through space, response times and explicit judgements. We seek a PhD student to investigate how adults’ mental state tracking abilities variously link to, and depend on, motor processes. The student will be enrolled at Victoria University of Wellington, in the coolest capital city in the world – Wellington, New Zealand. The successful candidate will be co-supervised by Associate Professor Jason Low (School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington) and Associate Professor Stephen Butterfill (Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick).

To apply, please refer to the Faculty of Graduate Research, www.victoria.ac.nz/fgr. New PhD applicants should complete the PhD Admission and Scholarship online application available from http://www.victoria.ac.nz/fgr/prospective-phds/applying and clearly indicate they wish to apply for the “PhD Scholarship in Psychology – Motor Processing For Tracking Others’ Mental States.” Applicants should include in their expression of research interest a statement detailing why they are interested in this project. The online application must be completed by 5.00pm (NZ time) on 1 March 2018. Interested applicants are encouraged to make informal enquiries to: Associate Professor Jason Low ( [Email Address Removed]).