Grasso-Cladera, A., Arenas-Perez, M., Wegertseder-Martinez, P., Vilina, E., Mattoli-Sanchez, J. and Parada, F.J. (2025) ‘Neuroscientific insights into the built environment: A systematic review of empirical research on indoor environmental quality, physiological dynamics, and psychological well-being in real-life contexts’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 22(6), 824. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22060824.

Grasso-Cladera and colleagues relocate environmental neuroscience from the controlled image or virtual room toward the unstable conditions of everyday occupancy. Their systematic review examines real-life studies of indoor environmental quality—especially thermal comfort, air quality, lighting and related variables—using physiological measures including heart activity, skin temperature and brain dynamics. Thermal comfort emerges as the most frequently investigated factor, but the deeper contribution is methodological: the authors advocate Mobile Brain/Body Imaging and situated experimental designs capable of recording coupled brain–body–environment dynamics while people act naturally. They explicitly frame the “real world” as laboratory, accepting reduced experimental control in exchange for greater ecological validity and behavioural relevance. The paper also emphasises multimodal sensing, coherent theoretical frameworks and interdisciplinary teams because no single biomarker can adequately represent well-being. Its wider bridge is ecological psychology and situated cognition, replacing stimulus–response simplification with a dynamic account of agents whose cognitive and physiological states arise through continuous interaction with materially variable environments.