Postdoctoral Researcher in Experimental Psychology and Psychophysiology - 1.0 FTE

About this position

Are you excited about studying how people respond to challenging situations in healthcare? Do you have a strong interest in experimental psychology, psychophysiology, sensing technologies, and advanced quantitative methods? Are you fascinated by fundamental questions about stress, cognitive load, attention, and emotion, but equally motivated to translate these questions into applied settings such as healthcare training?

Then this postdoctoral position may be the one for you.

The Department of Computational Cognitive Science at Tilburg University is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to work on the three-year VR-STRESS project.

VR-STRESS is a cross-border research and innovation project aimed at developing an adaptive virtual reality system for medical training. The project investigates how (neuro)physiological, behavioral, and interaction data can be used to infer a user's cognitive and emotional state during training, and how these insights can be used to adapt the training environment in real time.

A central component of the project is the development of an integrated system for measuring and interpreting user state during virtual-reality training. The system will combine multiple non-invasive sensing modalities and connect physiological and behavioral responses to relevant aspects of user state, such as stress, mental workload, attention, fatigue, emotion, and performance.

The postdoctoral researcher will take a leading role in the experimental and psychophysiological part of this work. You will investigate how these signals can be measured reliably across individuals and experimental conditions, and how they relate to subjective experience and task performance.

You will work closely with a project team of researchers, engineers, VR specialists, data scientists, and project partners from academia and industry.

Your position

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will design and conduct controlled experiments aimed at understanding and measuring cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses in immersive training environments.

You will contribute to the selection, calibration, validation, and integration of non-invasive sensing technologies and develop experimental protocols for reliable physiological measurement during VR use. An important part of the work will involve examining how physiological and behavioral responses change under different levels of stress, task difficulty, and cognitive demand.

You will analyze multimodal datasets that combine physiological signals, behavioral measures, self-reports, and performance data, using advanced statistical and quantitative methods. In close collaboration with data scientists, you will also contribute to the development and validation of machine-learning approaches for estimating user state and to the integration of these estimates into adaptive VR environments.

Your work will focus on:

designing and conducting rigorous experimental studies on stress, cognitive load, and human performance in VR;

developing and evaluating methods for multimodal physiological and behavioral measurement;

analyzing complex datasets and relating physiological responses to subjective and objective measures of user state and performance;

collaborating across disciplines on machine-learning, adaptive VR, and the scientific dissemination of project results.

The position offers considerable scope for developing fundamental research questions alongside the applied objectives of the project.