Psycho-biological factors associated with underground spaces: What can the new era of cognitive neuroscience offer to their study?

Abstract

Working in underground spaces appears to be a possible solution for urban areas with lack of space or areas characterised by extremes of temperature. Besides pure engineering questions, it is also critical to understand the relationship between the architectural specificities of underground spaces and human behaviour and performance. Research to date has provided preliminary evidence on this question. Yet, during the last decade, contemporary cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology and behavioural science have made impressive progress in the measurement, monitoring and understanding of human cognition and behaviour. These novel approaches offer advanced tools to study the human brain, body and mind; other disciplines (economics, political science, ergonomics and, recently, architecture) have successfully adopted these methods. The aim of the present paper is to introduce these concepts to the research community who studies the effects of underground work and offer practical examples of how these methods can be employed to understand crucial problems related to “underground psychology”. These new conceptual tools enable reliable isolation of various cognitive functions in a quantifiable way; identification of individual differences in responses to the environment; uncovering of underlying motivational factors; and establishment of a more mechanistic explanation of human behaviour. Cognitive neuroscience inspired methods offer a new exciting, comprehensive, more objective, and systematic examination of human behaviour in underground spaces and open new possibilities for identification of effective interventional strategies to improve the design of modern underground environments.