The Science of Agency in Uncertain Worlds.
At ibiLab, we study what happens to human cognition, agency, and embodiment when the rules we rely on stop holding.
To navigate the world without breaking, the mind must know how it maps, and the body must know it is safe.
How does the nervous system sustain action when the world becomes unreliable?
We build experimental worlds to study how people orient, adapt, and act across uncertainty — from future leadership and altered gravity to non-Euclidean space and neurocognitive decline.
Perception and action depend on learned regularities, including stable reference frames, predictable sensorimotor consequences, and internal models that relate movement to its effects. When geometry, gravity, bodily feedback, or environmental dynamics change, those regularities no longer support accurate prediction.
ibiLab uses controlled immersive environments to perturb these relationships and measure how people reorient, update predictions, regulate uncertainty, and recover effective action. By varying the structure of a world while recording behavioural and physiological responses, we study the mechanisms that connect spatial cognition, embodiment, adaptation, and agency.
The same framework supports two connected lines of inquiry. We study cognition under altered spatial and physical constraints alongside judgment and adaptive action in leaders operating under uncertainty.
Leadership research
Agency, judgment, and adaptation under consequential uncertainty.
Explore the lab's research framework for how leaders orient, revise internal models, and act when prior assumptions no longer predict the environment.
Explore Leadership Research 02Research programmes
Experimental manipulation of geometry, physics, movement, and navigation.
Review the questions, experimental paradigms, and measurement strategies across the lab's six research programmes.
Explore Research