Õ¬ÄÐÊÓƵ

Thesis title: Spatial Knowledge acquisition: The Aha! moment of sudden spatial reorientation and its underlying cognitive mechanism

Research

Primary and secondary supervisors 

Dr Sean Hanna and Professor Alan Penn 

Abstract

The subject of this PhD lies within a multidisciplinary field of research between the areas of architecture, spatial cognition and cognitive neuroscience. In particular, I am interested in questions such as: how humans encode spatial information, store it in memory and use it to navigate and orient in the built environment. Investigating these issues in real-world scenarios with neurophysiological methods may result in intriguing findings that can, in turn, enhance evidence-based design.

The present research introduces the use of mobile Electroencephalography (EEG) to the study the emergence of specific mental events in real-world environmental interaction. The main focus is on the Aha! moment of sudden reorientation after disorientation and the visuospatial qualities and configurations that might trigger it. 

The Aha! moment is an insightful response to problem solving situations and environmental interaction, in the form of ‘one-shot’ learning, resulting in explicit reportable knowledge. The new understanding emerges suddenly into awareness after a period of impasses and requires perceptual restructuring of the information, a switch of the mental representation.

The moment of sudden spatial reorientation, for instance, is a moment that such a representational switch, a kind of turning around the map in our heads, reaches awareness and changes our course of action. However, spatial representational switches occur constantly while we move in space and store spatial information in memory.

Spatial navigation involves repeated cycles of transformation between egocentric (self-to-object relation) and allocentric (object-to-object relation) representations. This research focuses on the moment(s) when a switch between the spatial reference frames is triggered. The objective of the study is to gather empirical evidence regarding this subjective experience and collect neurophysiological data using EEG and Virtual Reality environments.

Biography

Efrosini Charalambous holds a diploma on Architecture Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece (NTUA) and a Master’s Degree in Advanced Architecture (self-sufficient habitat / digital fabrication) from the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Cataluña (IAAC-UPC) in Barcelona. She has lived and worked in Athens, Basel, Barcelona and Cyprus as a free-lancer as well as in collaboration with several architectural studios.

Over the years she has developed, as an architect, a particular curiosity in spatial experience and perception, issues that she has also explored through Contact Improvisation dance and body movement, Buddhist tradition and meditation techniques. Becoming familiar with these new first-person perspectives on spatial interaction and perception, she has developed an interest towards the cognitive sciences and psychology.

She rejoined the academic community in 2013 with the desire to combine her architecture background with the knowledge offered by cognitive neuroscience. She has been awarded a scholarship form the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) and she is currently a PhD student at the Bartlett School of Architecture: Space Syntax Lab. She is interested in how humans perceive, experience and cognize space. Efrosini’s PhD research is focused on the underlying cognitive processes of the mental ‘event’ of the Aha moment and how this event may emerge from spatial interaction.

Publications and other work

• Charalambous E., Papachristoforou A. (2008) ‘Sites of Complexity in the Urban Field: Monastiraki streetscapes’, OnSite Review 19: Street, Edited by White Stephanie, Alberta.
• Charalambous E., Farinea C.,Piperidou Y. (2008) ‘Adaptive Microclimates’ Complessità e Sostenibilità: il territorio e l’architecture, No 07 Gangemi Editore
• Charalambous E. ‘Spatial Cognition: Brain Activity During the Integration of Distinct Spatial Representations’ Archi-DOCT 3, July 2015 (Accepted for publication)