Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network — EXPLORA

Host Institution: Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Türkiye

Start Date: February 1, 2026 (flexible)

Funding Duration: 36 months

Degree: PhD in Psychology

EXPLORA is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network funded by the EU Horizon Europe Programme, investigating how active exploration shapes perception of materials, objects, and spaces. The network brings together 14 PhD candidates across Europe and integrates expertise from psychology, design, engineering, and art. Each PhD will contribute to EXPLORA's scientific goals while engaging in interdisciplinary training, secondments, and the creation of "EXPLORA kits", outreach tools for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) education.

The PhD candidate at METUsense will examine how culture modulates the perception and linguistic representation of material sounds. When we touch or manipulate materials, the resulting sounds contain rich cues about their properties, such as fluidity, roughness, or granularity. Different cultures also describe these experiences through distinctive sound-symbolic words (e.g., onomatopoeia) such as şırıl şırıl, pütür pütür, pıtır pıtır. In this project, we will measure cross-cultural differences in the perception of natural material sounds with acoustic analyses of exploration sounds and phonetic analyses of corresponding words. This will allow us to examine the universality of sound symbolism in material perception and investigate auditory contributions to multisensory exploration in realistic contexts.

The PhD candidate will receive training in psychophysics, multisensory perception, acoustic analysis, and cultural cognition, and will collaborate closely with other EXPLORA teams. During the PhD, there will be two Secondments where the candidate will visit these research labs:

1. Kyoto University, Japan (Prof. Shin'ya Nishida)
– Duration: 4 weeks (Month 28)
– Focus: Cultural universality in sound symbolism and multisensory exploration.
2. Delft University of Technology, Netherlands (Dr. Gijs Huisman)
– Duration: 2 weeks (Month 29)
– Focus: Material perception and multisensory interaction in XR environments.

We are looking for:

• MSc in psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, computer science, or related fields
• Interest in multisensory perception, sound symbolism, and cultural cognition
• Experience with experimental design, signal/acoustic analysis, or programming (MATLAB, Python, R)
• Motivation to work in a multinational, interdisciplinary team

MSCA Eligibility:

• You must not already hold a PhD.
• You must not have resided or carried out your main activity in Türkiye for more than 12 months in the 36 months prior to recruitment.
• Official applications will begin shortly. You may follow the announcements through the Graduate School at METU: https://sbe.metu.edu.tr/en/application

Learn more about EXPLORA: https://explora-network.github.io/web/index.html