Neuroscientist whose research focused on the role of the hippocampus region of the brain in navigation, personal memory and imagination

In 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire published the study that would bring her worldwide fame. It showed that a brain region called the posterior hippocampus was larger in London taxi drivers who had acquired the Knowledge – a mental map of the British capital complete with streets, routes and landmarks – than in people who lacked those navigational skills. The longer the cabbie’s career, the bigger the posterior hippocampus.

Maguire, who has died aged 54 of cancer, had joined the young Functional Imaging Laboratory (FIL) at University College London (UCL) only five years earlier. Her stunning demonstration of the brain’s plasticity was immediately plastered over newspapers’ front pages. It won her an Ig Nobel prize, awarded for discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”, and landed her uncomfortably on a panel where her work upstaged that of three Nobel laureates.

It also launched a lifelong wariness of the press. “I sometimes feel a bit like an ageing rock singer,” she told the journal Current Biology in 2012. “I’m singing new songs, but the media only want to hear the old tunes.”

The new songs, and the old tunes, all fitted seamlessly into a programme of enquiry that she had embarked on as a psychology undergraduate at University College Dublin in the 1980s. Navigationally challenged herself, she set out to understand how people negotiate and recollect their paths through the world, and what happens when this capacity deserts them – as it did in some patients who had undergone brain surgery for intractable epilepsy.

In the early 90s, when she was working with such patients, she came across a paper that the psychologists John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel had published over a decade earlier, in which they proposed – contentiously at the time – that the hippocampus was key to the mental representation of space. A new scientific world opened up to Maguire: “the wondrous world of the hippocampus,” as she put it, “with its exquisite anatomy and physiology”.

The role of the hippocampus, not only in navigation, but also in episodic or personal memory, and in imagination, became the focus of her research. The unifying theme was scene construction theory, the idea that the hippocampus constantly builds and updates spatially coherent scenes that represent and anticipate the changing environment using information beyond what is immediately available to the senses.

This she tested through meticulous studies of amnesic patients and healthy people, often using cutting-edge technologies. Combining virtual reality and functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, she peered inside people’s brains as they negotiated a fictional town called FILbury, complete with dog parks, buskers and a lost man asking his way.

“Eleanor demonstrated that memory is the building block of imagination, through her surprising finding that people who were amnesic from damage to their hippocampus also could not construct new imagined experiences in their mind’s eye,” said her former colleague Geraint Rees.

She acknowledged her good fortune in finding herself in London as functional neuroimaging was taking off and the clinical neuroscientist Richard Frackowiak was establishing the FIL, but fortune favours the prepared mind and she would eventually be lauded by those who had shown her the way. “Her work, starting with the taxi drivers, really linked the human hippocampus to space as well as memory,” says Nadel, who is based at the University of Arizona. “Just about everything she did broke new ground.”

Maguire was born in Dublin, the younger of two children of Anne, a receptionist, and Paddy, a factory worker. Conscientious even in primary school, she often had to be chivvied away from her homework to eat dinner, and her nascent taste for science manifested in a love of archaeology, astronomy and biology. Her parents ruled out the first on the grounds that it could not support a living, and she eventually dismissed the second with characteristic wit: “In Dublin in the late 1980s, studying astronomy seemed like pie in the sky.” That left biology, and after a master’s in neuropsychology at Swansea University and a PhD back at UCD, she joined the FIL.

It was an exciting time, and she knew she had found an ecosystem in which she could thrive. Colleagues admired her deceptively simple experimental designs, and before long she was running her own lab. She remained at the FIL for the rest of her career, appointed professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL in 2007. “It was her home,” said her friend and former FIL director Cathy Price.

In the little downtime she accorded herself, she gravitated to the stands of Selhurst Park in south London, the home ground of Crystal Palace – the football club she started supporting in her youth because, according to a former colleague, Tom Miller, its name sounded “magical and regal”.

Her devotion to the FIL and to her students never wavered. These included Sir Demis Hassabis, the first author on their 2007 paper about imagination in amnesic patients, who went on to co-found the artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind, bought by Google in 2014, and to win a Nobel prize.

After she was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2022, Maguire concentrated on guiding her last doctoral students to success. It was a source of pride for her, Price said, when Hassabis visited her two days before she died, bringing his Nobel medal.

Another was a much-reported study in the British Medical Journal a few weeks earlier, showing that taxi drivers were somewhat protected against dementia. By the time of her death, she may have found some measure of peace with the media who had so shaped, or distorted, her career.

She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2016 and of the British Academy in 2018.

Maguire is survived by her parents.

• Eleanor Anne Maguire, cognitive neuroscientist, born 27 March 1970; died 4 January 2025