Post-doctoral Research Fellowship: MSCA-IF 2017 at the Department of Experimental Psychology

Professor Julio Santiago, 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 this university. Applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information in the participant guide: http://sl.ugr.es/097k).

Julio Santiago is head of the Grounded Cognition Lab (www.groundedcognitionlab.com), which in turn is part of the Cognitive Neuroscience Group (neurocog.ugr.es). The group is housed at the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center (cimcyc.ugr.es), which is endowed with all necessary facilities for the study of the mind and the brain, including fMRI, TMS, EEG, behavioral testing units, eye trackers, and so on. The Grounded Cognition Lab aims at advancing the understanding of the grounded, embedded, embodied, situated, extended, and dynamic nature of the human mind.

The goal of the project TIME is to carry out an exploration of several dimensions of the human conceptualization of time: spatial location, distance, evaluation, economic decision making, self-continuity, and depth both toward the past and the future. These dimensions are expected to vary consistently depending on temporal focus, the attention paid to the past versus the future. The project has two strands: cross-cultural and within-culture. At the cross-cultural level, we will measure cultural temporal focus and religiosity across several cultures, and assess how these cultural differences covary with the temporal dimensions of interest. We selected two Western cultures (Spain and USA), two Middle-Eastern cultures (Morocco and Turkey), and one Far-Eastern culture (Taiwan). Two specific contrasts are also included in order to test effects of religion without confoundings from language, socioeconomic class and many other social and cultural variables: in the USA, we will compare American Orthodox Jews with non-Jew Americans. In Bosnia & Herzegovina, we will compare Serbians (Orthodox Christian), Croatians (Catholic Christians), and Bosnians (Muslim). At the within-culture level, we will carry out several experiments at the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Center of the University of Granada. The behavioral experiments will manipulate temporal focus and emotion and will assess their effects on measures of the relevant temporal dimensions. A brain imaging experiment will test whether brain areas related to valuation are activated by past and future temporal distance and predict intertemporal economic decisions for past and future events. All in all, the present project constitutes one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of research about psychological time.

Research Area:

• Social Sciences and Humanities (SOC)

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

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)