Research Supervisor Connect
All animals, including people, learn how to predict or control important events based on prior experience with cues or actions that precede those events. But how do animals learn these relations, and how does that learning affect behaviour?
The experiments in this project investigate simple forms of associative learning in rats and humans. It moves beyond the century-old view, still at the heart of modern AI, that learning is just the strengthening of connections. It describes learning and responding within the formal mathematical framework of Information Theory, objectively quantifying how much information can be learned and how much certainty the learner can have about the outcome. Unlike its forebears, this approach ties learning to objectively measurable properties of the events being learned about and provides a means to quantify how learning maps onto behaviour. This will refocus our understanding of what learning is and provide new insights into how the learner’s experience shapes their learning.
Requirements: applicants have training in experimental psychology and computational science.
This opportunity/project is part of the Faculty of Science Australian Research Council (ARC) Scholarship scheme and is now advertised on the Scholarship Office website. Applications are open and will close on 18 January 2026.
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is 3724