Contacting the Lab

To contact the lab PI, please write to christopher.summerfield@psy.ox.ac.uk.

We recruit volunteers to participate in our experiments! If you are interested, please write to HIPlab@psy.ox.ac.uk or search for us on Prolific Academic. You will be compensated for your time at approximately living wage (£10-12/h)

Visitors: If you are visiting us in person, New Radcliffe House can be found here.

Data and Code

We are committed to open science. Data and source code for our publications should be available on our GitHub site. If you would like access to a dataset that you can’t find there, please email the PI.

Climate Change

We are alarmed by the world’s inaction over climate change. We are committed to sustainable travel wherever possible. The lab PI does not fly to give talks, examine vivas or review grants (but is always happy to take the train!). For more details, see here.

Joining the Lab as a PhD student

We’re always interested in hearing from people who are interested in joining the lab.

If you are interested in joining the lab as a PhD student, please first read the information on the Oxford University Graduate Admissions pages. The admissions deadline is in early December each year. Please look carefully at the research topics studied in the lab; it is not possible for us to support applications from students in very different research areas. It’s probably worth pointing out that Oxford offers relatively few funded scholarships, and these are extremely competitive, especially if you are from outside the UK. However, if you have a good academic track record, strong research experience, and ideally publications, prizes and excellent references, then you are in with a chance! We do not support self-funded students or applicants to the MSc by Research programme.

We are not accepting enquiries from any more candidates for 2025 entry.

  • new for 2026 entry *

For entry in 2026 (deadline December 2025), we are starting a new process. Please apply first to the PI by 1 November using this Google Form. It will ask you to submit a brief cover statement, CV, and a 1-page proposal sketch. We will get back to you shortly after Nov 1 if we are interested in supporting your application.

Tips for good proposals

The department requests a 4-page research proposal. The admissions committee will expect to see a proposal with the following elements:

  • An introduction that sets out the current state of the literature
  • A clearly articulated research question that is grounded in this literature
  • A methodological approach that is carefully designed to answer the research question
  • About 2-3 proposed experiments (can be simulations) with specific predictions, ideally that build upon one another in a coherent fashion
  • Some sort of statement of what we will know after the research has been conducted that we do not know now

We won’t support proposals that are wildly different from the work that we are currently doing (see our papers), or proposals that involve methods to which we don’t currently have access (e.g. animal research, again see papers).

Joining the Lab as a visitor or postdoc

  • If you are interested in joining as a visiting researcher or student, do write to us. You will need to have funding for your stay - we can’t provide funds or take unpaid interns, and we don’t usually take visitors for less than a 6-month stay. All visits have to be approved by a central committee in the department. If you need a visa to study in the UK, unfortunately it’s not usually possible for the department to help with administrative issues, so it’s unlikely to be impossible.

  • We have a new funding award from the Wellcome Trust and are actively looking for postdocs. please get in touch if you are interested: christopher.summerfield@psy.ox.ac.uk.