Phd Position F - M The Impact Of Object Reactivity And Task Guidance on Exploration Strategies And Curiosity H/F

INRIA

PhD Position F/M The impact of object reactivity and task guidance on exploration strategies and curiosity
Le descriptif de l'offre ci-dessous est en Anglais
Type de contrat : CDD

Niveau de diplôme exigé : Bac +5 ou équivalent

Fonction : Doctorant

A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle

The Inria center at the University of Bordeaux is one of the nine Inria centers in France and has about twenty research teams.. The Inria centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative SMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute...

Contexte et atouts du poste

The 3-year PhD offer is part of the EXPLORA project (see explora-network.github.io), a 4 years EU-funded Doctoral
Network (recruitment from February to October 2026). It will take place in France, at Inria Bordeaux. Eligible
candidates must have lived in France no more than 12 months in the 36 months preceding recruitment.
The main focus of EXPLORA is the active exploration of objects, materials, scenes, and how this impacts visual,
haptic and auditory perception. Our team will be concerned more specifically with the visual perception of virtual
scenes, when one interacts with them through bodily motions on or in front of screens (touch, head or eye motion),
which we call embodied exploration. Different persons are expected to employ different exploration strategies depending
on the task they are given (e.g., see [Lin et al., 2025]). For instance, when asked to evaluate the appearance of a glossy object, the way reflections move might be explored in different ways: directly manipulating the object; observing it from different viewpoints; moving a flashlight around; etc. Our goal is to understand how these exploration strategies affect visual perception, with a particular focus on curiosity.

Mission confiée

Principales activités

The project will first require to develop 2D and 3D real-time graphics applications, which may be interacted with
through touch, eye or head tracking. The candidate will be able to work from two existing prototypes: a 2D touchbased
application running on Android tablets; and a 3D renderer controlled by eye- and head-tracking implemented in
Unity for desktop computers. Other devices (e.g, VR headsets) or middleware (e.g., Godot) might be considered. We
will use these applications to run live psycho-physics experiments, with the goal to identify visual cues involved in the
perception of materials, shapes or dynamics during exploration. We envision three main study designs to investigate
how different exploration strategies and interventions may affect available visual cues:
- Active tasks in which the subject will be asked to perform judgments on object appearance. Tasks will be
constrained to different extents, from specific guidelines to free exploration. We will study correlations between
the apparition of visual cues appearing through exploration, and the task performance of subjects.
- Passive tasks will rely on similar experiments, except in this case subjects will be shown recordings of previous
active task sessions. Visual cues available to subjects will thus be the same, yet we expect that passively looking
at a video should affect performance compared to the active condition. The analysis will be complemented with
eye-tracking data, which may reveal differences in anticipation between active and passive conditions.
- Real time interventions will be incorporated in active tasks, with the goal of masking or exaggerating visual
cues in response to the subject's exploration. They will be used to test hypotheses on how actively-foraged
visual cues affect object perception. Interventions themselves should not be attention-grabbing in order to avoid
breaking the immersion: they will thus be constrained to changes that are less noticeable [Martin et al., 2023],
or happen during lapses of attention such as eye blinks or saccades [Nakano et al., 2013].

Compétences

A Masters degree in computer science/engineering or similar

Experiences in:

3D/GPU programming
XR/VR devices
Experimental design

Avantages

- Subsidized meals
- Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
- Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
- Possibility of partial teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
- Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
- Social, cultural and sports events and activities
- Access to vocational training
- Social security coverage

Rémunération

The EU provides support for each recruited researcher in the form of :

- a living allowance
- a mobility allowance
- if applicable, family, long-term leave and special needs allowances

In addition, funding is provided for

- research, training and networking activities
- management and indirect costs