Soto-faraco, Salvador

Biography

I graduated in Psychology at the Universitat de Barcelona (1994), and I got a PhD in Cognitive Science and Language (1999) in the same university. I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (UK) and at the University of British Columbia (Canada). In 2002 I was awarded a "Ramón y Cajal" research fellowship, which allowed me to start my own research group at Universitat de Barcelona and in 2005 I became ICREA Research Professor and established the Multisensory Research Group at the Parc Científic de Barcelona thanks to public and private funding. Since 2009, I am based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where I combine research and teaching as one of the group leaders at the Center for Brain and Cognition. In 2010 I received an individual Starting Grant from the ERC. Currently, the MRG group works on basic and applied research projects supported by local (MINECO, AGAUR) and EU (ERC) funding agencies.

Research Interest

Humans, like other animals, are endowed with a wide range of sensory capacities such as hearing, feeling, seeing, smelling,... This rich variety of senses allows our brains to represent the surrounding environment with fidelity and precision, so that we can select, store and react successfully to events. However, to achieve coherent mental representations of the environment our brains must coordinate the distinct sources of sensory information effectively across their different temporal properties, spatial frames of reference, and encoding formats. I am interested in the neural and behavioural principles underlying the selection and integration of such multi-sensory information. To achieve this, I use an experimental approach based on psychophysics, a variety of neuroimaging methods to measure neural activity (EEG, fMRI), and brain stimulation techniques (TMS).