Prof Hugo Spiers

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

Experimental Psychology

Div of Psychology & Lang Sciences

Joined UCL: 6th Oct 2003

Research summary

Hugo Spiers is director of the Spatial Cognition Laboratory at UCL. His research team study how our brain constructs representations of the world and uses them to navigate, imagine the future and remember the past. The research group are based in the UCL Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and use brain imaging, neuropsychological testing, virtual reality, eye-tracking and single cell recording as methods to understand brain function and spatial cognition.

Teaching summary

Dr Hugo Spiers has the following roles:

Director of the MSc in Psychological Sciences

Departmental Tutor for the Integrated BSc in Psychology for Medical Students

Departmental Tutor for Psychology in Human Sciences BSc.

He is the module convenor for PSYC2205: Brain and Behaviour for the BSc Psychology degree and PSYCGR13: Brain and Mind for the MSc in Psychological Sciences.

Education

University College London: Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy |
University College London: First Degree, Bachelor of Science (Honours) | 1998

Biography

Hugo Spiers has over 20 years of neuroscience research experience. He gained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience under the supervision of Neil Burgess and John O'Keefe. After post-doctoral fellowships at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (with Kim Graham) and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuro-imaging (with Eleanor Maguire) he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Advanced Training Fellowship to learn single unit recording at UCL. He now employs cognitive and behavioural neuroscience techniques to study the neural basis of spatial cognition. In 2016 he launched the Sea Hero Quest project with Prof Michael Hornberger at UEA which has tested nearly 3 million people world wide on their spatial navigation abilities.