Eric Schulz

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who wants to innovate at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. 📍Munich 📅Flexible start: 10/2026–03/2027 ⏳Full consideration by 14/08/2026 💼Funded for 2 years, extension possible Discover, grow, collaborate, eat cake.

📣 Work with me on AI and behavioral science. I am hiring an Assistant Professor (3 years) at WU Vienna, in collaboration with my team at the MPI for Human Development. Start Jan 2027 or by arrangement. Deadline Nov 11. Please share. jobs.wu.ac.at/Assistant-Pr...

Amazing work done by @modirshanechi.bsky.social. Very happy that this got an oral at neurips as a pure theory paper. Alireza is setting up his own lab now and everyone should consider joining him.

👩‍🎤🚀 COSMOS is coming back in 2027! We just learned we will receive funding from @tuda.bsky.social to organize our 4th iteration in 2027. So please watch this space for future updates from me and @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social In the meantime, materials & talk recordings 👉 cosmossummerschool.github.io

📢 Two initiatives for displaced students and academics that deserve more publicity: 🇩🇪 www.maxminds.mpg.de - Max Planck mentorship scheme for displaced scholars 🇳🇱 www.dutchscholarsforpalestine.nl/scholarships... scholarships for Palestinians in NL If you know of more please add in reply

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Celebrate by reading a #biography of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. @crestonbooks.bsky.social #bookposse #teachers #librarians #educators #homeschoolers #bookstagram #booktok #booksky #edusky #WomenInSTEM #scicomm #STEM #STEAM #STEMeducation #WomenWhoCode

Make sure to follow @natvelali.bsky.social for awesome science + sketches!! 👩‍🔬🎨

What if we stopped building a new theory for every experiment and started building theories that explain them all? We built CORE, a model that combines a small set of computational principles to explain human behavior across many tasks. A first step toward a radically different cognitive science.

What if we stopped building a new theory for every experiment and started building theories that explain them all? We built CORE, a model that combines a small set of computational principles to explain human behavior across many tasks. A first step toward a radically different cognitive science.

Modeling decision dynamics improves ability to distinguish RL from WM - both recovery and out of sample prediction, with clinical differences revealed

Excited to be launching our new PhD program in Minds and Machines at UCL with co-Directors Tali Sharot and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social To apply, find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Our launch event is on Nov 10th, with a cracking lineup of speakers: luma.com/cikzcth0

Huge congratulations to this year's winners of the #NobelPrize in #Physiology or #Medicine! 🎉They are Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann & Georg Nagel, who were honoured for developing #optogenetics - techniques for controlling genes with light.

New preprint! Can LLMs really know when they know? We trained 10 open models to predict their own accuracy and found a striking limit: out of distribution, confidence tracks consistency more than correctness. Led by @nicolasyax.bsky.social with @pyoudeyer.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2609.33886

Incredibly excited to announce that I’m starting my own research group at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Gießen as part of the excellence cluster “The Adaptive Mind”! 🥳 I'm looking to fill the first PhD position. If you’re interested, apply here: tinyurl.com/38p3h22p Please spread the word! 🙏

Incredibly happy and proud to see Franziska starting her own lab in Gießen. Go work with her. You won’t regret it. And she knows better than most just how important a lab’s first PhD student is. 😉

📢 The CORE COGNITION lab (core-cognition.github.io) is looking to hire another PhD student, working on automated scientific discovery and knowledge representation in cognitive science. Starting date: March to September 2027. 🙏 Please share widely!

Alireza is a great scientist and a wonderful collaborator. I'm sad to see him leave but very happy for him to take this next step. I'm sure his lab will do amazing work. I would seriously consider joining if I could.

If you're in London in Sept and haven't seen our £50M Lab UCL PEARL... ...why not come down in Sept have a look around and pick up £30 as a participant in our next crazy neurocience & architecture study - Minds in Motion: mindsinmotioncrowd.netlify.app

One week left to apply.

Deadline to apply is August 14th. If you are looking for a postdoc on foundation models, open-ended discovery, or general ml-approaches to/in cognitive science, we would like to work with you.

How do children’s exploration strategies change across development? New preprint with Azzurra Ruggeri, Silja Kessler, and @ericschulz.bsky.social: “Tiny Alchemists: The Developmental Emergence of Empowerment in Exploration” osf.io/preprints/ps... Paper summary below 1/6

New work led by Franziska on the developmental trajectory of empowerment based exploration.

Very excited about this. One of the first steps to truly automate the discovery process in the cognitive sciences.

1/ 🚨 New preprint: "Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist" Introducing AutoCog 🤖 — a fully autonomous AI system that runs the entire scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science to surface novel theories of human behavior 🧵

1/ 🚨 New opinion piece: "Can we automatize scientific discovery in the cognitive sciences?" We lay out a vision for a fully automated, in-silico science of the mind, where modern AI systems run every stage of the scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science 🧵 #AutomatedDiscovery #AI4Science

Watch as Akshay is automating the discovery process in the cognitive sciences. Exciting times!

Excited to announce that I'll be starting my own lab in Tübingen this October! Hiring at all levels: Postdoc, PhD & RA. Want to work on computational cognitive science at scale? Apply: core-cognition.github.io Reposts and shares much appreciated 🙏

Join us at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig as a fully funded 4-year postdoc position (m/f/d) in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (Area: Social Cognition). Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by 13 July: recruitingapp-5218.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/44...?

To appear in Computational Brain & Behavior soon: the claimed 2024 proof (also in CBB) that AGI via learning is intractable also "proves" that ImageNet is intractable. My reading of the hole: equivocation on the variable D. Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2411.06498

Alireza Modirshanechi, Benjamin Eysenbach, Peter Dayan, Eric Schulz: Unifying Goal-Conditioned RL and Unsupervised Skill Learning via Control-Maximization https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06145 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.06145 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.06145

Talk to the model here: talkie-lm.com/chat

If you are attending #ICLR2026, please come and say hi to our group members presenting the papers 👇

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

Attending #Cosyne2026? Come by our poster in the afternoon (#021) to talk about the sense of control, empowerment, and agency. 🧠🤖 We propose a unifying formulation of the sense of control and empirically characterize the human subjective sense of control. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧑‍🔬🧪🔬

📢📢 Announcing this year's conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience & AI (Rome, 9-12th June). We’ve got a stellar line-up and venue, and invite everyone to join: www.neuromonster.org

One week left to apply!

🚨 Hiring in Munich 🇩🇪: 2 open-topic PhD positions in human & machine learning (TVöD E13 80%). Start ~June 2026 (flexible). Deadline: March 2, 2026. Apply/info: hcai-munich.com/PhD_Job_Ad.pdf Reposts appreciated 🙏

Do people's internal representations of natural objects differ? We (@ericschulz.bsky.social) show so by incorporating idiosyncrasies into neural nets to create better models of human behavior. We also reliably extract idiosyncrasies and map them to demographics. More: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pxt9a

Very happy to see this pre-print out. Our first step towards incorporating individual differences when aligning neural network representations to diverse crowds.

Honored to have been interviewed about Claude's "soul document" as part of an article for this week's @spiegel.de. www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...

🔬 We're hiring a Junior Group Leader for Data-Driven Digital Twins/System Models in medicine/life sciences at @uni_goettingen! Perfect opportunity for early-career researchers who want to: - Lead their own research group - Work at the intersection of AI, simulation, and biomedicine

📆 updated for 2026! list of summer schools & short courses in the realm of (computational) neuroscience or data analysis of EEG / MEG / LFP: 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We present the decisions-from-experience database (DfE-DB), including data from 168 studies. The data are currently shared with the original authors and made public upon publication. 🔗 Database: github.com/dwulff/dfe-db 🔗 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...