Can designers and cognitive neuroscientists collaborate to design a more navigable world? Professor Kate Jeffery (UCL) joined us to explore how cognitive mapping and other spatial processes underpin wayfinding in both humans and animals. How people and animals find their way around has been an intensive topic of research for almost a century, and recent discoveries have shed light on the existence of structures in the brain that collectively contribute to wayfinding. Kate reviewed some of these discoveries and highlighted insights on how the brain makes sense of the spatial world.
About our speaker
Kate Jeffery is a behavioural neuroscientist at University College London (UCL). Her scientific research explores how the brain makes an internal map of space for use in navigation and memory. She heads the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL, and is co-director of the electrophysiology company Axona Ltd. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Institute of Navigation, in which she chairs the Cognition and Navigation special interest group. She is interested in making and communicating links between scientific research findings and real-world societal problems, notably urban design for navigation, and the climate crisis.