CV Carles Escera

Carles Escera studied psychology at the University of Barcelona (degree in 1987), and after his PhD in 1993, he had more than one year postdoctoral training at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology (University of Helsinki, Finland). Since 1997, he is Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona (Catalonia-Spain), where he leads the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group.

His research interests are in the brain mechanisms subserving goal-oriented behavior, that is, those related to higher cognitive functions. Mostly attention, working memory and auditory perception. In particular, he is currently interested in how goal-oriented behavioral programs interact with the environmental input, that is to say, how top-down processes interact with bottom-up, stimulus-driven processes.

As a good example of this interaction, he is investigating involuntary attention. In his current experiments, he manipulates distractor features, irrelevant stimulus-main task contingencies, stimulus significance, and working memory load, and measures brain activity, either as ERPs, MEG or fMRI.  

He is currently a fellow of the Hanse Wissenschaftkolleg in Delmenhorst.

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