Lucia Jacobs: 'Why the mind evolved: the evolution of navigation in real landscapes'

Lucia Jacobs is a biologist and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, where she leads the Laboratory of Cognitive Biology. She is interested in how a mind is created from the building blocks of learning over evolutionary time, starting at the beginning of multi-cellular time with the evolution of spatial navigation. She studies two domains: spatial cognition, how limbic brain structures, such as the hippocampus and olfactory systems, diversify and adapt to the demands of ecological niches, and “cognition in the wild”, the decision processes of tree squirrels as a model behavioral economic system.