Dr Hugo Spiers is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. Using brain imaging, eye tracking and psychological tests he investigates the way the human brain works when we are trying find our way around and how it guides our sense of direction.
His research includes how our brain constructs representations of the world and uses them to navigate the present, imagine the future and remember the past.
Dr Spiers leads the UCL Spatial Cognition Group looking into how small constellations of brain cells contribute to mapping space and guiding our sense of direction. He gained his PhD at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in the research group 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 Neuroimaging (with Eleanor Maguire) he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Advanced Training Fellowship to learn single unit recording.
