The Mind Meeting Seminar Series is back! On Tuesday 24 November 2026, 3.00 pm CEST, Prof. Matthias Stangl Boston University ( USA) will give a hybrid talk entitled “Cognitive Maps in Action: Neural Representations of Self and Others in the Real World”.
The talk, organized by the Doeller Lab and Bicanski Lab, will take place on site (in the Wilhelm Wundt Room at the MPI CBS) and virtually via Zoom. Please join us and subscribe to the Mind Meeting Mailing List on our homepage!
Abstract
As we move through the world, the human brain continuously constructs and updates a cognitive map that supports spatial navigation and memory. This map integrates information about our location, movement, orientation, and the structure of the surrounding environment. In everyday life, navigation is also fundamentally social: we move through shared spaces while monitoring where other people are and how their actions relate to our own. How the human brain builds and updates these cognitive maps – and integrates information about both the self and others on the fast timescales of movement, gaze, and decision-making – remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will describe a multimodal “neuroscience in the wild” approach that combines intracranial electrophysiological recordings with wearable sensing of real-world behavior, including movement dynamics and interactions with the surrounding environment. I will present evidence that medial temporal lobe activity reflects key components of the cognitive map, including one’s current location, movement dynamics, environmental features, and the locations and movements of other individuals. These neural representations are flexibly reconfigured as behavioral goals shift during continuous, natural behavior. Together, these findings reveal moment-to-moment coupling between deep brain activity and natural actions, and provide mechanistic insight into how the human brain builds, updates, and uses an integrated “social” cognitive map during real-world navigation.
