Research
I have completed my PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Southampton, UK in May, 2009. My doctoral thesis was focusing on how humans learn, navigate and optimize information about their environments. Via a series of quantitative analysis, the thesis investigated how do we explore novel spaces in both physical and virtual realities, including digital information spaces (web/computational/e-learning). In particular, it showed human spatial strategies emerging in exploratory patterns.
“An inherent trade-off mechanism optimizes between the cognitive demands and behavioural costs of an action. Spatial strategies are dynamic and emergent patterns of a continuously changing interaction between the explorer and its environment.”
To analyze spatial strategies, I have developed an automated classification algorithm that clustered exploration patterns during the participants’ initial encounter with the space. Moreover, these patterns predicted subsequent navigation efficiencies (Makany, Redhead, & Dror, 2007, QJExpPsy). There were 2 main clusters: ‘axial‘ & ‘circular‘ patterns (or ‘lazy’ & ‘curious’ as we sometimes call them informally):
Spatial Orientation and Neural Correlates
Earlier in 2000, I was a member of the Spatial Orientation and Psychopathology Research Laboratory in Hungary. The group – led by Prof. Janos Kallai and advised by Prof. W. Jake Jacobs and Prof. Lynn Nadel – was describing exploratory strategies via analyzing behavioural motion patterns during a physical navigation task (Makany & Kallai, 2004, Noldus News) as well as in a virtual Morris maze (Kallai, Makany, Karadi, & Jacobs, 2005, Behav.Brain.Res.). In this line of work, we have identified groups of exploratory patterns, which were functionally relevant to navigation. Moreover, the dynamics of the strategies were analysed as a function of time and spatial learning.
I was also involved in an MRI volumetry study of lateralization and development interactions of human brain structures due to intrauterine hormonal levels. We found evidence that external bodily features, such as the 2D:4D finger digit ratio, can be associated with asymmetry of certain neural structures as a consequence of the level of testosterone hormone in the mother during pregnancy, but not linked to actual hormone level in the participant itself (Kallai, Csatho, Kover, Makany, et al., 2005, Psy.Res.Neuroimaging).
