Zakaria Djebbara

Thanks, Hugo! Means a lot coming from you!

I want to thank all participants and the BBAR and BeMoBIL team; Dylan Huynh, Aleks Koselevs, Yiru Chen, Lars Fich and of course, Klaus Gramann for their contribution and efforts! Especially to @mobilebrainimaging.bsky.social for his continuous support!

Conclusion: Naturalistic locomotion with mobile EEG demonstrated that architectural decisions, such as corners, can invert classic attention patterns. Our brains tune to architecture beyond passive background; it is an active part of it.

Surprisingly, environments shape us, just as we shape them.

EEG revealed it too. Both N1 and P3 components were modulated by turn angle — sharper turns reduced amplitudes, especially for congruent cues. Corners redistribute attention, demanding new visuomotor coordination.

Turning angles mattered: effects emerged around 15° (accuracy) and 30° (RTs). This shows that even subtle architectural geometry shapes perception and response — not metaphorically, but literally, through embodied movement.

Behaviour is to some extent shaped by architectural decisions!

In VR, participants navigated corridors with different turning angles. Visual targets appeared either congruent or incongruent with the turn direction. Surprisingly, attention costs flipped — faster, more accurate for incongruent stimuli!

Turning corners in built environments shifts spatial attention costs Human attention is typically studied under static laboratory conditions, yet everyday cognition unfolds during active interactions with the built envi…

🚀 New paper! We just took a major step in understanding how architecture shapes cognition.

Our paper shows that something as simple as corners in rooms or corridors can shift canonical spatial attention cueing costs.

Key method? Mobile Brain/Body Imaging combined with VR!

bit.ly/47m6ssV

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

🚨 We’re running a short self-report study on how BREATHING interacts with your daily life 🫁🌍

We're struggling to find participants and would truly appreciate your help; it only takes a few minutes.

👉 You can participate here: shorturl.at/rwwXc

🙏 Feel free to share the link with others. Thank you!

Memory is not just in the head. It’s scaffolded by spatial structure.

This opens new doors in neuroarchitecture, design psychology, and the science of memory.

#Neuroarchitecture #Memory #VR #EmbodiedCognition #EnvironmentalPsychology #Landmarks #EpisodicMemory #SpatialCognition

Investigating the effects of landmarks on memory performance The built environment profoundly influences our brain, shaping how we perceive, remember, and interact with the world around us. Far from serving sole…

🚨 New publication!

My PhD student, Dylan Huynh, explored how landmarks and spatial geometry affect episodic memory using immersive VR.

We found that people remember better, and learn faster, when the environment around them is distinctive.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🌊🧠🏛️

If we argue that we only sense a limited number of things, and that the totality of information is just the possibility space built from those sensory inputs, then we’re essentially restating empiricism. The idea that thoughts are just combinations of sensory types sounds like an echo of empiricism.

Isn’t that what’s implicitly happening now… Many cognitive neuroscience studies investigate early responses that make up conscious experiences, but interpret them under different frameworks, so they won’t use labels like unconscious.

I am delighted to announce the upcoming

6th International Mobile Brain/Body Imaging Conference

in Berlin, August 26-28, 2026 at the beautiful Hotel Oderberger!

More information to follow in the coming weeks.
See you in Berlin in 2026!

#MobileEEG #MobileBrainImaging #EEG #NIRS #MoBI2026

Theta activity supports landmark-based correction of naturalistic human path integration How do humans integrate landmarks to update their spatial position during active navigation task? Using immersive virtual reality and high-density mobile EEG, we investigated the neural underpinnings ...

Our new preprint is out with @stephen-ramanoel.bsky.social and @mobilebrainimaging.bsky.social !!! 🥳

Combining mobile EEG and Virtual Reality our results highlight multifaceted role of theta activity in the RSC during naturalistic human path integration

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is amazing work!

We found that participants consistently prioritized shorter distances over visible destinations, highlighting that cognitive maps might be more influential than visual appearance in navigation decisions.

In Virtual Reality, freely moving participants navigated a uniform environment (more or less a maze-like environment with no unique features to function as landmarks), with varied distance and visibility to their target.

Does the visibility of destination matter more than distance in human navigation? A pilot virtual reality study Navigational decisions depend on both cognitive maps and immediate sensory experiences of the environment. However, when both cognitive maps and immediate sensory experiences are uncertain, it is u...

Cognitive Maps vs. Visibility 🧠👀

In uncertain environments, how do we make navigation decisions? Is the distance on our mental map more important, or is it the destination's visibility?

This study was conducted by architecture students in our science book club!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Very strange and suspect behaviour from OAP. Some science sleuthing skills in this thread expose their fishy activity.

Be careful out there friends!

This feels like an invitation😁 So... just a heads-up that we are recruiting for 5 positions pretty soon in the area of cognitive/behavioural neuroscience/psychology. Scotland is a beautiful place and we have some amazing science going on here... watch this space!

Architectural atmospheres, priming effects and first impressions: a multi-perspective approach integrating self-report assessments and physiological responses This paper studies the priming effects of architectural atmospheres on our first impressions of space. We applied a multi-perspective approach combining first-person-perspective insights (self-repo...

Ever wondered whether atmospheres affect your experience of the next space?

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

HOT OFF THE PRESS - Back in 2019 we started asking ourselves what could you to demonstrate where werable, OPM-MEG technology could fit into naturalistic #neuroskyence.

One snag, we'd have to build the system from scratch first...

Anyway its 2025, read the paper here -> doi.org/10.1162/imag...

Congrats George and team! Hope you’re all doing well

It gives a nice overview of complexity science and is a good reminder that our fields are just man-made boundaries of natural processes. One should probably strive to become antidisciplinary, really. Great book!

I’m only a few books in here in 2025, but this one is already a good candidate as my favourite this year!

Could a linear regression with effect-coding be useful here? That could replace an ANOVA and qualify your post-hoc contrasts 😁

Poster for workshop: Introduction to cognitive ethnography

Poster for Dimensions of Radical Embodiment 3

Poster for workshop on Computational creativity, embodiment, and problem solving

🚨 Call for contributions!

We are hosting Dimensions of Radical Embodiment 3 at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, June 18-21, 2025

We are accepting abstract submissions for talks, posters, and brief ideas!

Deadline: March 14, 2025

radicalembodiment3.github.io

Map of london with the planned routes of 43 taxi drivers overlaid in yellow lines.

🚨 new publication from our lab in @pnas.org !
"Expert navigators deploy rational complexity–based decision precaching for large-scale real-world planning"

Entropy of streets & successor representations explain planning speed

Colab wth Daniel McNamee at Champalimaud

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...