Victoria D. Chamizo

Biography

I completed my BA, MA and PhD degrees in Madrid (at the Autonomous University of Madrid) and I was a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK) on two occasions and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK) several times before becoming a Lecturer and then a Professor at the University of Barcelona (Catalunya, Spain). I have been the President of the “Spanish Society for Comparative Psychology” -SEPC in Spanish- in 2003 and in 2016, also the President and then vice-President of the “Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology” -SEPEX in Spanish- between 2004 and 2008. I have also served as Program Chair for Division 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the 2012 meeting.

Research Interest

Most of my work is about spatial cognition and associative learning. Specifically, I am interested in studying the conditions, basic effects and mechanisms responsible for the acquisition of knowledge about spatial location in rats and also in humans. My research for the past 30 years has been mainly in collaboration with Professor N.J. Mackintosh†, from Cambridge University (UK), as well as with other colleagues and students from the Universitat de Barcelona. This joint research developed into a research group, which I co-ordinate, whose name is “Learning and Cognition: A comparative approach” (http://www.gracec.info). The main results of our work have been the demonstration that the basic phenomena of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning (like blocking, overshadowing, latent inhibition, perceptual learning, changes in attention to relevant and irrelevant cues ...) also appear when working with strictly spatial tasks (both in the elevated maze and in the Morris water maze). In the last decade, we have also shown that male and female rats can use different strategies to solve navigation tasks (a finding often called “qualitative sex differences”), being crucial the distinction between what they learn and what they prefer (i.e., learning vs. performance). In this line of research we have also measured age effects in our animals. Specifically, a change in the behaviour of female rats as they grow older. At present I continue to investigate these issues, fundamentally qualitative sex differences in a navigation task while acquiring knowledge based on geometrical and non-geometrical information simultaneously. Standard associative theories can explain most of our results.