Ecological Study of the Brain UCL

Overview

This Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) Ecogical Study of the Brain at UCL brings together supervisors from psychology, neuroscience, geography, engineering, architecture, education, and computer sciences, sharing the vision that they can achieve a step-change in both the understanding of how humans function in the environment and how to change the environment to best suit human endeavours.

Key Facts

Understanding how humans operate in the real-world, the ecological niche in which the brain has evolved, is critical to explaining the richness of human experiences. Most scientific knowledge about brain and behaviour, however, comes from laboratory studies focusing on a single domain (language processing) and sacrifice real-world context to achieve experimental control (recognition of isolated words rather than face-to-face communication). At the other end of the spectrum, scholars studying real-world phenomena often sacrifice experimental control in order to conduct studies in naturalistic settings. Laboratory experiments, however, often have limited external validity, while naturalistic approaches are descriptive, and therefore do not address causal relationships between brain, behaviour and the environment.

To explain the inherent richness of human experiences, a radical change in approach to brain and behavioural research is needed that enables future leaders to harness and further develop new methods and technologies – part of the digital revolution – to measure behaviour and brain activity in the wild (wearable devices and wireless electroencephalography), to bring real-world complexity into the lab (virtual and augmented reality, large-scale modifiable real- world facilities) and to analyse the wealth of data these methods produce (blind signal source separation, graph-theoretic analysis).

Regardless of the specific topic (spatial navigation, social interaction, language), you will use an Ecological Brain approach combining methods from real-world cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science, with lab-based experimentation, computational modelling etc to address basic and applied questions concerning the relationship between people and their environment.