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Applications are invited for a fully-funded three year PhD to commence in October 2026. 

The PhD will be based in the School of Psychology, Sport and Health Sciences (Faculty of Science & Health), and will be supervised by Dr Sophie Milward, Dr Esther Herrmann and Dr Juliane Kaminski. 

Candidates applying for this project may be eligible to compete for one of a small number of bursaries available. Successful applicants will receive a bursary to cover tuition fees for three years and a stipend in line with the UKRI rate (£20,780 for 2025/26).Bursary recipients will also receive a £1,500 p.a. for project costs/consumables.

Costs for student visa and immigration health surcharge are not covered by this bursary. For further guidance and advice visit our international and EU students ‘Visa FAQs’ page.

Please note, these funded PhDs are only open to new students who do not hold a previous doctoral level qualification.

Cooperation is so deeply embedded in human psychology that we spontaneously track a partner’s task as well as our own when acting in a pair. This automatic ‘co-representation’ of a partner’s mental representation of their task has been argued to be key to the sophisticated social coordination we see in human adults. However, our day-to-day encounters are not limited to one-to-one interactions. This will be the first study to investigate children’s capacity for group co-representation, to see whether there are limits on the number of partners that can be tracked at once. We will take a developmental perspective, testing 4-5 year-old children, in order to investigate the level of cognitive complexity that is involved in this behaviour and the role of key factors in early childhood that lead to better cooperation in groups.  Further, we will test whether this phenomenon is a human universal, by comparing behaviours across two cultures in the UK and Kenya.  Finally, we will test whether we prioritise the tracking of certain members of a group over others, depending on whether they share our group identity or not. This will provide key information about the limits of our capacity to keep others in mind, and the psychological underpinnings of how we do so.

How to apply

If you have any project-specific questions please contact Dr Sophie Milward (), quoting the project code.

When you are ready to apply, please use our . Make sure you submit a personal statement, proof of your degrees and grades, details of two referees, proof of your English language proficiency and an up-to-date CV.  Our ‘How to Apply’ page offers further guidance on the PhD application process.

Please also include a research proposal of 1,000 words outlining the main features of your proposed research design – including how it meets the stated objectives, the challenges this project may present, and how the work will build on or challenge existing research in the above field.

If you want to be considered for this funded PhD opportunity you must quote project code PSH50670126 when applying. Please note that email applications are not accepted.