Salvador Soto-Faraco

Salvador Soto-Faraco

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Social & Behavioural Sciences

I graduated in Psychology in 1994 and completed a PhD in Cognitive Science in 1999 at Universitat de Barcelona. I worked at the University of Oxford (UK) during my PhD as well as a postdoc, before moving to University of British Columbia (Canada). I returned to Spain as a Ramón y Cajal fellow and started a research group at Universitat de Barcelona in 2002, and I became ICREA Research Professor at the Parc Científic de Barcelona in 2005, where I established the Multisensory Research Group thanks to public and private funding. Since 2009, I am based at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where I combine research and teaching as one of the group leaders of the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC), of which I am the director as of 2022. I received an ERC-StG in 2010, and an ERC PoC in 2016. Currently, the MRG works on basic and applied research projects supported by national (MINECO, AGAUR, BBVA Foundation) and international EU (ERC, BIAL, MSCF) funding sources.

Research interests

I am interested in multisensory perception and attention in humans. Like many other animals, humans are endowed with a wide range of sensory capacities such as hearing, feeling, seeing, smelling and so on. This rich variety of senses allows our brains to represent the surrounding environment with fidelity and precision, so that we can parse information, maintain it as memories, make decisions, and plan and carry out actions. However, to achieve coherent mental representations our brains must coordinate the distinct sources of sensory information effectively across their different temporal scales, spatial frames of reference, and representational formats. I am interested in the neural and behavioural principles underlying the selection, integration and representation of such multisensory information. To achieve this, I use experimental approaches based on psychophysics, a variety of neuroimaging methods to measure neural activity (EEG, fMRI), and brain stimulation techniques (TMS).

Selected publications

- Barbosa J, Stein H, Zorowitz S, Niv Y, Summerfield C, Soto-Faraco S & Hyafil A 2023, 'A practical guide for studying human behavior in the lab', Behavior Research Methods, 55, 58-76.

- Esparza-Iaizzo M, Vigue-Guix I, Ruzzoli M, Torralba-Cuello M & Soto-Faraco S 2023, 'Long-Range a-Synchronization as Control Signal for BCI: A Feasibility Study', Eneuro, 10, 3.

- Sanz-Aznar J, Bruni LE & Soto-Faraco S 2023. 'Cinematographic continuity edits across shot scales and camera angles: An ERP analysis'. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 17, 1173704.
 
- Vigué-Guix I & Soto-Faraco S 2023, 'Using occipital ⍺-bursts to modulate behavior in real-time', Cerebral Cortex, 33, 16, 9465–9477.
- Marly A, Yazdjian A & Soto-Faraco S 2023, 'The role of conflict processing in multisensory perception: behavioural and electroencephalography evidence', Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society B-biological Sciences, 378, 1886, 20220346.

- Marti-Marca A, Vilà-Balló A, Cerda-Company X, et al. 2023, 'Exploring sensory sensitivity, cortical excitability, and habituation in episodic migraine, as a function of age and disease severity, using the pattern-reversal task', Journal Of Headache And Pain, 24, 1, 104.

- Rodríguez-Prada C, Burgaleta M., Morís-Fernández L, Vadillo MA, & Soto-Faraco S 2023, 'Online
Scientific Production', Collabra: Psychology, 9, 1, 90197.