Working at the UvA
The Faculty of Humanities provides education and conducts research with a strong international profile in a large number of disciplines in the field of language and culture. Located in the heart of Amsterdam, the Faculty maintains close ties with many cultural institutes in the capital city. There are almost 1,250 employees affiliated with the Faculty, which has about 7,200 students.
The Cognitive Science Center (CSCA) is a unique interdisciplinary center that fulfils a number of functions within the University of Amsterdam. It serves as a platform and community for cognitive scientists interested in a wide range of Cognitive Science topics, ranging from perception to memory, decision-making, music, language and logic. Research projects within the CSCA are carried out in the participating institutes (such as the ILLC) but the Center also has its own research programme focusing on research questions that cross the borders between disciplines. This programme is carried out at the CSCA Research Center, which is strongly linked with the Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging. The combination of state of the art neuroimaging facilities with the ambitious interdisciplinary research groups creates a true center of excellence in the field of cognition as a whole.
The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. ILLC's central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Emphasis is on natural and formal languages, but other information carriers, such as images and music, are studied as well. Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and philosophy.
The CSCA/ILLC invites applications for a:
PhD position in Music Cognition
0.8 FTE
vacancy number 10-3032
The PhD student will take part in the CSCA research programme: The role of neural plasticity in conscious perception and will be supervised by the principal investigator Prof. Henkjan Honing and a postdoctoral researcher. This programme consists of three intertwined projects addressing the following three questions:
- Does consciousness require synaptic plasticity?
- Does perceptual learning depend on consciousness and not on attention?
- Does conscious perception depend on previous learning of image statistics?
The PhD project will mainly contribute to the second question by studying hierarchical time perception in adults. In addition, the project will be concerned with the computational modeling of the temporal aspects of music (such as rhythm, timing, and tempo) and the role of perception, attention, expectation and memory in music cognition. Next to computational modeling, we will use brain imaging techniques to identify global neural correlates of rhythm perception.
Tasks
- Complete and defend a PhD thesis within four years
- Regularly present intermediate research results at international workshops and conferences, and publish them in proceedings and journals
- Collaborate with the researchers in other parts of the programme supervised by Prof. V. Lamme, Prof. C. Pennartz and Prof. A. Smeulders
- Participate in the organization of the programme's research activities and events, such as conferences, workshops, and joined publications
- Assist in teaching activities in the domain of music cognition
Requirements
- A Master's degree with excellent grades in a relevant field, such as cognitive science, music cognition, computer science or psychology
- Candidates should have a keen interest in music cognition
- Candidates should have demonstrable skills in either computational modeling and/or in experimental psychology
- Good academic writing and presentation skills
- Good social and organisational skills
Appointment
The PhD candidate will be appointed for a period of four years at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. A contract will be given in the first instance for one year, with an extension for the following three years on the basis of a positive evaluation. The gross monthly salary (on a full time basis) will be €2,042 during the first year and will reach €2,612 during the fourth year.
Job application
Applications including a cover letter, curriculum vitae, two letters of reference, and an application statement should be submitted before 1 September 2010. Please sent your documents to: ILLC Office, University of Amsterdam, attn. Ms Ingrid van Loon, P.O. Box 94242, 1090 GE Amsterdam, The Netherlands, or to: i.m.vanloon@uva.nl
Please state the vacancy number and 'strictly confidential' in the upper left corner of the envelope or in the subject field of your email.
In the application statement (approximately 500 words) the candidate should express his or her interest in the programme, and is invited to specify his or her own ideas on the research questions addressed in relation to the study of the temporal aspects of music cognition.