Our ability to recall past events, navigate the environment and imagine the future all rely on representations of space. Core spatial properties of distances and angles between locations are represented in range of different ways in our brain. Our research seeks to understand how such information is coded, by which brain regions and when is it deployed to support behaviour.

A significiant amount of research on navigaiton has focused on controlled abstracted environments. Our research has sought to extend this to real-world environments which our brain's evolved to navigate. Research in recent years has focused London's Soho, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, and Kensington. We have examined how the brain processes the distance and direction to the goal during navigation of such environments.

Understanding the environment and planning future sequences of behaviour are a significant challenge due to the vastness of the stimuli and options for planning. Organising neural represenations and processing of these representations based on hierachical structure can dramatically reduce the complexity of knowledge stored and planning. We are exploring how the brain forms and uses such hierachical represenations to navigate space.

Our group uses the following methods: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), single unit recording, local field potentional recording, neuropsychology, virtual reality (VR), computational modelling, maching learning, mass online data collectio methods.