Post-doctoral Research Visit F/m Postdoctoral Offer: Metacognition in Bio-realistic Artificial Intelligence Networks

Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais_

**Type de contrat**: CDD

**Niveau de diplôme exigé**: Thèse ou équivalent

**Fonction**: Post-Doctorant

**Niveau d'expérience souhaité**: Jeune diplômé

**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 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...

Every year Inria International Relations Department has a few postdoctoral positions **in order to support Inria international collaborations**.

The postdoctoral contract will have a duration of** 24 months**. The default start date is **November 1st, 2025 and not later than January, 1st 2026**. The postdoctoral fellow will be recruited by one of the Inria Centres in France but it is recommended that the time is shared between France and the partner’s country (please note that the postdoctoral fellow has to start his/her contract being in France and that the visits have to respect Inria rules for missions).

**Mission confiée**:
**Principales activités**:
Metacognition is the cognitive process by which, instead of just learning to associate a response or a behavior with a situation, animals (and mainly primates) monitor the functioning (and particularly errors) of simple cognitive processes, learn to inhibit automatic responses and promote instead contextually appropriate behavioral rules.

Better understanding and modeling this process is important for several reasons. In cognitive neuroscience, it paves the way to exploring higher cognitive functions like reasoning, imagination and other kinds of deliberation-based thoughts. In Artificial Intelligence, it stands on the same grounds as Generative AI and proposes different processes and algorithms that might remedy several weaknesses of GenAI and suggest innovative brain-inspired extensions.

The Mnemosyne Inria team in Bordeaux and the Machine Learning CWI group in Amsterdam have a long experience in cognitive computational neuroscience and have recently launched a new project, MetaBrain, with the aim of specifying the computational mechanisms of metacognition, defining relevant tasks to assess the performance of metacognitive models and organizing a network of international teams contributing to the topic.

The role of the postdoctoral fellow to be recruited is to participate to the MetaBrain project, under the following axes:

- Axis 1: Specification of Metacognition and its main computational mechanisms:_

When several elementary competences have been learned (possibility to associate a response with a situation), the role of Metacognition (or cognitive control) is to control the performances of the competences, the selection or the coordination of the most appropriate ones depending on the context, or the creation of a new one. This is generally described through three main mechanisms: (i) the possibility to monitor cues indicating difficulties in the process of problem solving (errors or conflicts between resources), in order to inhibit elementary default responses, (ii) working memory to keep in sustained activity the different aspects to be integrated (goals and subgoals, predictions, constraints) and (iii) cognitive flexibility corresponding to new goals and contextual rules that can be learned and integrated in the process of problem solving.
- Axis 2: Definition of relevant tasks in the domain of visual reasoning:_

Although many standard tasks have been defined and shared for simple sensorimotor control, it is not yet the case for cognitive control, generally corresponding to much more complex behaviors. A variety of tasks have been proposed in models mentioned above but they differently integrate fundamental constituents such as hierarchical and temporal dependencies. In a similar view of standardization as in the axis above, the goal will be consequently to enumerate properties that have to be assessed when developing such metacognitive models and propose or design corresponding tasks.

Subsequently, the postdoctoral fellow will work on integrating the insights from Axis 1 and task definitions in this Axis, with an architecture that integrates selected mechanisms from