Cambridge Cognitive Architecture
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Mission
Three Research Pillars
Our mission is to quantify how built environments affect cognition, behaviour and health and apply that evidence to design humane environments.
Real-world capture
of spatial and social cognition
Most evidence on how people experience buildings comes from laboratory studies. Measuring in real buildings is challenging: the signals are noisier, and the measurement itself can change what people do, and there are various ethical challenges.
We work in high-risk, high-stress settings, from emergency departments and clinical wards to analogue space habitats, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to record movement, arousal and interaction, ranging from ethnography and interviews to wearable psychophysiology, environmental sensors and computer vision.
Behavioural experiments
to test design hypotheses
In an occupied building, natural variation in spatial configuration is confounded with a range of factors, from staffing to occupancy flow. To complement our work on how naturalistic variation in real-world configurations affects cognition and behaviour, we run controlled behavioural experiments and build cognitively grounded agent-based models that isolate the effect of specific features (curvature, enclosure, visibility, functional allocation) on a range of outcome measures.
Each experimental setting trades realism for control. Virtual reality lets many design variants be tested cheaply and safely, but constrains locomotion, scale cues and sensory detail. Augmented reality keeps the body in a real space, with its real acoustics and materials, while altering what is seen, so it suits targeted manipulations rather than wholesale reconfiguration. Full-scale mockups restore material, acoustic and social presence, at the cost of building only a handful of variants. None of them is the real world, so we choose the setting to match the hypothesis and, where it matters, test the same question in more than one.
Co-design with evidence
on human cognition
Evidence only matters if it reaches the people making decisions. Reasoning about unbuilt space imposes a high working memory load, and co-design brings together stakeholders with very different spatial abilities, so imagining how a design will shape behaviour is far easier for some people than for others.
We therefore treat co-design as an experimental setting in its own right: spatial visualisations and full-scale mockups place the evidence onto the configuration under discussion, and wearables give us insight into where a group coheres, where it diverges and where decisions stall. Evidence stays open to challenge and refinement. To speed up the exploration of design spaces, we also develop generative simulation tools that help clinical, institutional and policy partners link design decisions to cognitive and health outcomes.
Team
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Alumni
- Leonel AguilarVisiting Scholar, 2025
- Aurora Chenxi WangMPhil, 2025
- Haining DingMPhil, 2025
- Xiangfeng ZhouMPhil, 2024
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