MSCA-IF: Joint application at the University of Granada. Department of Experimental Psychology.

Professor Teresa Bajo, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) in 2020 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information: http://sl.ugr.es/0aNV).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. The UGR has been awarded with the "Human Resources Excellence in Research (HRS4R)", which reflects the UGR’s commitment to continuously improve its human resource policies in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The UGR is also a leading institution in research, located in the top 5/10 of Spanish universities by a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, or international funding.

UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking (http://sl.ugr.es/0aw0). The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) places the UGR in 268th position in the world and as the 4th highest ranked University in Spain, reaffirming its position as an institution at the forefront of national and international research. From the perspective of specialist areas in the ARWU rankings, the UGR is outstanding in Documentation (ranked in the 36th in the world) or Food science technology (ranked 37th in the world), Mathematics and Computer Science (ranked among the top 76-100 in the world).

The UGR has 4 researchers at the top of the Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list in the Computer Science area. With regard to broader subject fields, the UGR is ranked in 45th position in the universities worldwide in the discipline of Engineering. It is also well recognized for its web presence (http://sl.ugr.es/0a6i) taking 36th place in the top 200 Universities in Europe. Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of the Framework Programme of the European Union. For the duration of the last two Framework Programmes, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 18.02 million euros, and for H2020, 80 projects with total funding around 20.6 million euros.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

The Memory and Language Research Group is an interdisciplinary group with members affiliated to the University of Granada and Jaen (Spain). The head of the Group is Teresa Bajo and most of the group activities are developed at the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC) at the University of Granada which provide the groups with excellent research facilities and equipment to study memory and language processes from behavioural and neurocognitive approaches. Memory supports many complex cognitive skills and very especially those related to language and reasoning. Recently it has been proposed that the control of interference in memory is resolved by means of inhibitory control processes that are in charge of suppressing competing memories during memory retrieval. We are interested in understanding the nature of this mechanism in a variety of populations and situations by using a wide range of neuroscience techniques (behavioural, eye-tracking, EEG recording, transcraneal direct current stimulation –tDCS-, functional magnetic resonance imaging -fMRI). The group has active collaborations with international laboratories at Leiden, Edinburg, Padova, Penn State University, California, Irvine, and University of Florida. Stony Brook, and has active national and international projects on Individual differences in inhibitory control of memory; and Language selection and cognitive control in bilinguals and translators.

Project description

Memory plays a prominent role in our everyday reasoning activities by allowing us to access relevant past experiences, which could thus be applied to new situations. This type of analogical transfer is a fundamental tool on creative problem solving. A basic hypothesis underlying the experiments in the project is that reasoning skills and our ability to think creatively require activation of relevant information, but also control processes to supress irrelevant or unoriginal information. These processes involve opposite brain networks (DMN, FTPN) that interact and work together. The form of this interaction will depend of the particular contextual conditions that may favour one or another processing mode, but also on individual differences or the age of the participants. Thus, global or implicit conditions would overweight automatic associative processing while conditions stressing focused- detailed processing would overweight the controlled retrieval processes. Similarly, individual differences in brain connectivity might also bias the role of the brain networks and predict performance in creativity tasks. In this way, we assume that strengthen semantic activation and impaired executive control in older people would make them to rely on DMN-related processes during creative thinking to a larger extent than younger people. In the project we combine retrieval practice memory procedures with remote association and analogical tests to explore knowledge activation/ inhibition in creative thinking. Behavioural and neural data provides evidence of the interplay between the two processing modes as a function of the context and the age of the participants. Individual differences are also explored by introducing tasks to capture associative processing and executive control.

Research Area

Economic Sciences (ECO), Social Sciences and Humanities (SOC) and Life Sciences (LIFE)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Teresa Bajo (mbajo@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)