Post-doctoral position at University of Granada: Apply for an Athenea3i-2018 Research Fellowship at the Department of Experimental Psychology

Professor Juan Lupiáñez Castillo, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for an Athenea3i Research Fellowship in 2018 at this University. The information about the Fellowship conditions, how to apply, Eligibility Criteria, Selection Process, Evaluation Process, etc. is available in https://athenea3i.ugr.es/. Please note that applicants must comply with the Eligibility Criteria (https://athenea3i.ugr.es/?page_id=23).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. It serves more than 60000 students per year, including many foreign students, as UGR is the leader host institution in the Erasmus program. UGR, featuring 3650 professors and more than 2000 auxiliary personnel, offers a total of 75 degrees through its 112 departments and 28 centers.

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://www.arwu.org/), and it is also well recognized for its web presence (http://www.4icu.org/top200/).

Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of H2020, both at partner and coordination. For the duration of the Seventh Framework Programme, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 17.97 million euros, and for H2020, until 2015, more than 25 projects with total funding of more than 6 million euros. Our more than 3,000 researchers are grouped into 365 research groups covering all scientific fields and disciplines.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

According to the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking, 2017), the University of Granada is the best Spanish university in the field of Psychology, as it is within the top 150 worldwide. This is largely due to the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC), which accommodates a wide range of techniques to carry out world-class research and hosts a large, multidisciplinary, vibrant community of researchers devoted to the study of all areas of Psychology.

Within this center, our research group on Cognitive Neuroscience (neurocog.ugr.es), y the largest. We have access to fMRI, TMS, tCDS, eye tracker, electrophysiological (Biopac), and behabioral measures labs, and experts on all these techniques within the large research group.

Project description

Attention is considered a singular process, although with different mechanisms, functions and brain circuits involved, and central to human cognition, in different areas such as educational or clinical practice, industry, or sports. Recent conceptualizations consider these functions around three attentional networks (Alertness, Orienting and Cognitive Control), giving rise to the development of different experimental tasks to measure them (e.gr., ANT or ANTI), an enterprise to which the I have contributed significantly with different research projects. On the other hand, the study of the maintenance of attention over time is of great interest from both a theoretical and an applied perspective, which has also led to the development of specific tasks to measure this Vigilance (and its decrease over time in the task, e.gr. SART, PVT). In my current research project, we carry out a theoretical analysis of Vigilance that leads us to distinguish two distinct components, which we call Executive Vigilance and Activation or Arousal Vigilance. While the former refers to the sustained maintenance of a control state to respond according to goals, inhibiting other more automatic responses (as measured, for example, with SART), the second refers to the maintenance of a state of activation that facilitates the immediate and automatic reaction to external stimuli in the environment (as, for example, in the PVT task). The main objective of my current research project is to dissociate theoretically and empirically these two components of Vigilance and their neural bases, for which we have developed a task suitable to measure them in the context of the evaluation of the functioning of attentional networks: the ANTI-VEA task.

Research Area

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

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Juan Lupiáñez Castillo (jlupiane@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)