NLP & Behavioral Evaluation / Long-Range Language Understanding

Lead the behavioural-evaluation component of Mariya Toneva’s ERC BrainAlign project. The postdoc will develop tasks and a gamified platform to collect human understanding of full narratives and books, then evaluate brain-aligned language models against those data. The role combines NLP, machine learning and cognitive science, with collaboration across computational and neuroimaging teams. This vacancy belongs to the September 2026 Max Planck Postdoc Program call, which accepts applications until 13 October 2026 at 12:00 CEST through the official application platform.

PhD in NLP, computer science, cognitive science, psychology, psycholinguistics or a related field by appointment; strong NLP/model-evaluation, quantitative and programming skills. Human-experiment design experience is desirable.