Dr Guifen Chen

Guifen Chen

Senior Lecturer in Neurobiology
EDI co-Lead at SBBS

School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/staff/guifen-chen.html
Centre for Brain and Behaviour
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Research

Spatial navigation, Virtual reality, Sensory integration

Interests

The ability to navigate is an essential skill required by both humans and animals. Animals can use sensory cues across modalities, such as visual, auditory, olfactory, integrated with self-motion cues, to find their way home from a food searching journey. Neural activity in the hippocampus and adjacent cortical areas, has been shown to correlate with the physical location of an organism. However, it is not clear how an internal unified representation of space, which supports navigation, is generated by integrating sensory inputs across modalities.

Virtual reality offers a powerful tool for investigating spatial cognition, allowing environmental manipulations that are impossible in the real world. Two-dimensional immersive virtual reality allows a close approximation of spatial representation in the real world. Hence, my laboratory is studying the across-modal navigation in virtual environments, combining virtual reality techniques with in vivo electrophysiological recording (tetrode and Neuropixels probe recordings) and 2-photon imaging.