Spatial Cognition Group

During my undergraduate degree programme in Psychology, undertaken at UCL, I became increasingly interested in how the brain represents space and supports memory formation and retrieval.  Consequently, I will dedicate my PhD to studying place cells in rodents, by the means of single-unit recording. I plan to undertake the following research projects:

My first research aims to investigate a comparator hypothesis of hippocampal function.  This hypothesis states that the hippocampus acts as a match-mismatch detector, allowing an animal to detect associative changes in the environment.

Secondly, I aim to find out whether the hippocampus pre-plays future routes of an animal. Such a finding would imply that hippocampal activity can predict future actions of an animal and would support the suggestion that the hippocampus is involved in route planning.