Project on offer for 2023-24

If you are interested in this, please email me at kate.jeffery@glasgow.ac.uk

Background

When people navigate buildings they form a mental map of the layout, which they can use to find their way around in future. This project will investigate what information people use to form their maps. For some people we will use head-mounted virtual reality (VR) which produces an “immersive” experience similar to being physically in the building. For others we will use either desktop (personal computer) versions of the same buildings to compare immersive and non-immersive experience. We will also use questionnaires to obtain demographic information (age, gender etc.) and some simple tests of spatial and other types of mental ability.

Are edges and forms (landmarks) essential for orienting the internal sense of direction?

The internal sense of direction is supported by a system in the brain known as the head direction system, which combines information from the environment together with information about movement (such as vestibular information). The environmental cues are necessary to “reset” the system and keep it aligned with the external world, or else the signal drifts due to accumulated movement-tracking errors. This experiment will investigate whether the brain is able to use information about the entire visual scene to accomplish this resetting. We will use headset-based virtual environments in which large walls shaded smoothly from black to grey form the only orienting cues in the environment. In virtual reality, using headsets, participants will have to perform a task in which they navigate to the position of previosuly encountered objects. The angular deviation of their paths from the correct one will serve as a measure of how stable their direction sense remained.

Requirements

Students for this project will need to be doing at least two neuroscience-related level 4 modules

Background reading

To get an idea of the scientific questions about neurobiology that lie behind this project, this review article might be helpful:

Marozzi E and Jeffery, KJ (2012) Place, space and memory cells. Current Biology 22(22) R940-R942

For a more general perspective on how these findings relate to the human experience of space, try this:

Jeffery KJ (2019) Urban architecture: A cognitive neuroscience perspective The Design Journal 22(6)