Research Structure
A Theory-First, Multi-Species Approach
SCENE investigates three overarching non-exclusive hypotheses about how brains encode the world: prioritising all causal latent variables (H0), controllable latent variables — affordances (H1), or reward-predictive variables (H2). A single core team provides the theoretical and computational foundations, while four experimental teams test these hypotheses across species.
Research Teams
The collaboration consists of four species-specific experimental teams, a theory & data analysis team, and a data science core.
Highlights from the Teams
A rolling spotlight on the research happening inside SCENE's labs — what each group is asking, building, and contributing to the collaboration.
Noel Lab· University of MinnesotaHow did brains come to represent space? In a new perspective, the Noel lab and collaborators take an evolutionary view of the two systems the brain uses to map it: a fast, body-centred sense of “peripersonal space” — the zone within reach, where threats and opportunities unfold in milliseconds — and a slower, world-centred “cognitive map” for navigation, memory, and planning. Tracing a path from the first bilaterally symmetric animals, through the move from water to land, to the tool-using primate brain, they argue the two systems evolved in tandem and were gradually repurposed for tool use, social interaction, and even abstract thought — cognition growing outward from near-body safety into a multiscale system for flexible, goal-directed behaviour.
The brain relies on at least two spatial systems — a fast, body-centred map of peripersonal space and a slower, world-centred cognitive map — proposed here to have evolved in tandem. Figure from recent Noel-lab work.
