Cognitive neuroscience seeks to understand the brain processes that enable us to make sense of and act upon our world. My research in this field investigates how the brain represents the environments through which rodents move.
I study how animals perceive and navigate space, and the role of various neural systems in these navigational abilities. My focus is on the role of the hippocampal, entorhinal and retrosplenial regions, which perform distinct functions in spatial navigation. These regions contain neurons whose activity correlates with navigational behaviour. However, the properties of these spatial activities have mainly been studied in simple environments, such as open fields, with animals that are able to move freely. Yet spatial navigation is not that simple; animals, like humans, move between rooms and spaces connected by doors and corridors to reach a goal.
My research therefore focuses on the neural processes underlying spatial navigation in animals moving through more complex environments. Such behaviour depends on the functional interactions between the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex and the retrosplenial cortex.