Bachelor's/Master's Thesis & Internships
Are you interested in writing your thesis or doing an internship with us? We welcome enthusiastic students who are eager to contribute to our innovative projects and gain valuable experience. Feel free to reach out to us with your ideas and questions. We look forward to collaborating with you and supporting your academic journey.
Call for Bachelor's / Master's Thesis: AlienPsych
This study is about children’s social cognition, in particular, how they actively search for information about other agents. We test whether children can select informative observations that can help them find the answers to questions about small, animated aliens: for example whether they can climb well, or share fairly with their friends. Children play a short game on the computer in which they can select which videos they would like to watch.
Contact: Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz - laura.schlingloff-nemecz@tum.de
Call for Bachelor's / Master's Thesis: SANDBOX
The project investigates young children’s efficiency in searching for information.
By age three, children can already recognize the statistical features of their learning environment and adapt their learning strategies accordingly. However, it remains unclear whether young children can generate (cf. merely identify) efficient adaptive information-search strategies from scratch. In the current study, we tested the emergence of children’s ability to generate adaptive information-search actions and explored the potential sources of their suboptimality.
Requirements: German fluency would be needed in order to help with data collection. Starting in July or later
Contact: Oana Stanciu - go69wic@mytum.de and Kaixuan Chai - kx.chai@tum.de
Call for Bachelor's / Master's Thesis: MonsterChef
MonsterChef explores the emergence and developmental trajectory of children's understanding of when they should engage in self-guided learning in a task and when they should seek the help of a teacher. The experiment seeks to elucidate the cues and strategies children use at different developmental stages to determine how to pursue their learning goals.
Requirements: German fluency would be needed in order to help with data collection.Data collection will start in July.
Contact: Oana Stanciu - oana.stanciu@tum.de
Call for Bachelor's / Master's Thesis: Ampel
Ampel is a multiple-cue learning task implemented in Virtual Reality with 5-11-year-old children. To efficiently predict the behavior of agents and objects in the world, we can learn about the relationships between visual cues and related outcomes, instead of relying on memories of similar agents or objects that we encountered in the past. Building on previous research from our lab, with Ampel we aim to explore the developmental trajectory of multiple-cue learning in an immersive VR context, both in an active and passive (observer) role. We will test the hypothesis that an action framing may help children to efficiently learn cue-outcome relationships from an earlier age than passive observation
Requirements: German fluency needed for data collection in lab. Data collection starts earliest in August 2025.
Contact: Georgina Török - georgina.torok@tum.de
Call for Bachelor's / Master's Thesis: SELF
How do children learn about their own abilities? In this project, we study how 3- to 6-year-old children actively seek information about their own performance in different social situations—such as working alone, cooperating with others, or competing. Using fun game-based experiments, we investigate what kind of information children choose to learn and whether they use this information to guide their future decisions.
This project offers hands-on experience with experimental design, data collection, and analysis, and is ideal for students interested in developmental psychology, cognitive science, and learning.
Requirements: German fluency is needed to help with data collection. Data collection will start in March/April 2026.
Contact: Daniil Serko - daniil.serko(at)tum.de