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Institute of Psychology

Institute of Psychology

Photo: UHH/Aleksandra Gaus

Final Papers

Topics for B.Sc. and M.Sc. theses are described below, and will be updated continuously. If you are interested, please send a short letter of motivation by e-mail to the respective contact person (see descriptions). The descriptions are written in English, but the theses can also be written in German if the respective contact person agrees.

Applications are accepted year-round. For general inquiries, please send an email to: cmdn-lab.psych"AT"uni-hamburg.de.


Please also check our guidelines for writing theses.

How goals shape what counts in a decision

(with Sebastian Gluth)

Assume you are looking for a flat and comparing two options, one central and one quieter but further out. How much should being central count? Standard models of decision making answer with a number — your weight on that attribute — and treat it as a stable property of you. Yet the number plainly depends on what you want the flat for: if your goal for the coming year is an active social life it matters a great deal; if it is finishing your thesis, much less. Nothing about your tastes has changed, only the goal the attribute is serving. In this project we study how the weight given to an attribute depends on the goals a decision is meant to achieve, and how it changes when those goals do. Participants choose between candidates for jobs whose priorities vary from one block of the experiment to the next. The first studies run online; lab studies with eye-tracking are planned, where we can also ask how attention is distributed across attributes as the goals change.

Bachelor and Master students can take part in this project for their theses, with the only difference being the amount of study support and the complexity expected of the student's output. Theses can emerge from analyzing behavioral data, eye-tracking data, and – if interested – applying cognitive modeling to these data. Students joining early can also be involved in collecting the lab data.

References

Deciding when to look: information sampling in a changing world

(with Sebastian Gluth)

Imagine you are responsible for detecting the start of a disease outbreak. The outbreak itself is not directly visible to you — you can only consult indicators like hospital admissions, wastewater measurements, or self-reported symptoms, each noisy to a different degree and each costly to check. Should you consult only the most reliable indicator, look at all of them, or, when the picture already seems clear, not look at all? And once you have looked, how strongly should a surprising reading shift your belief that something has genuinely changed, rather than being a random fluctuation? Previous research has shown that people adapt how quickly they update their beliefs to the volatility of their environment (Nassar et al., 2010), but in these studies the evidence is simply handed to participants, whereas in everyday life we actively decide what to look at (Gluth et al., 2026). In this project, we are studying how people sample multiple information sources of differing reliability while tracking a hidden state that occasionally changes. Participants will monitor several cues that differ in noisiness and can freely choose which ones to inspect on each trial. After each trial, they report their belief that a change has occurred and decide whether to recommend a costly protective action, linking sampling behavior to belief updating and to consequential decisions.  

Bachelor and Master students can take part in this project for their theses, with the only difference being the amount of study support and the complexity expected of the student's output. Theses can emerge from analyzing behavioral data, eye-tracking data, and — if interested — applying Bayesian cognitive modeling to these data. 

References