Cognitive Scientist — Computational Human Behavior and Experimental Design

The role

Design behavioral experiments that distinguish genuine individual-specific prediction from the effects of context, memory, and measurement. You will define hypotheses, controls, baselines, and evaluation methods before the team builds a model around the data.

The work

• Design behavioral and cognitive experiments involving decision-making, preferences, attention, memory, reasoning and intention.
• Develop structured interviews and psychometric protocols to capture person-specific information.
• Create experimental tasks with measurable ground truth and appropriately designed controls.
• Work with ML researchers to define predictive targets, evaluation metrics and meaningful baselines.
• Design longitudinal studies examining how individual behavior changes across time and context.
• Quantify intra-individual variability, uncertainty, reliability and measurement effects.
• Investigate how physiological or multimodal observations may contribute additional predictive information.
• Develop participant protocols, informed-consent materials and ethically responsible human-data collection methods.

What matters

• Strong grounding in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computational cognitive science or behavioral science.
• Experience designing human-subject experiments and analyzing behavioral data.
• Understanding of experimental statistics, confounding, measurement validity and research reproducibility.
• Familiarity with Python, R or equivalent analysis tools.
• Interest in probabilistic cognitive models, computational theories of decision-making and modern AI.

What good work looks like

An experiment with a clear hypothesis, controls, meaningful evaluation metrics, and interpretable results.

Why this work matters

Design experiments that can distinguish genuine understanding from an attractive prediction.

Get in touch

Send us your CV, your personal website or examples of work you have done, particularly a study you designed, its central question and what the evidence showed. Include an informal handwritten statement of purpose, with no prescribed length, telling us why this mission matters to you, what difficult work has taught you, and what you would like to take responsibility for at Walnut. This mission will demand scientific rigor, patience, independent thinking and a willingness to test ideas against reality. Write the statement entirely in your own words, without using generative AI. We will not consider statements written using AI. A photograph or scan of the statement is sufficient, and a typed version is welcome if handwriting is difficult. A reference from someone who knows your work is welcome, but not required.