Salvador Soto-Faraco

Salvador Soto-Faraco

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Social & Behavioural Sciences

I obtained a BA in Psychology at the Universitat de Barcelona (1994), and completed a PhD in Cognitive Science and Language (1999) in the same university. Thereafter, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Oxford (UK) and University of British Columbia (Canada). In 2002 I returned to Spain with a "Ramón y Cajal" research fellowship, and started a research group at Universitat de Barcelona, and in 2005 I became ICREA Research Professor and established the Multisensory Research Group at the Parc Científic de Barcelona thanks to public and private funding. Since 2009, I am based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where I combine research and teaching as one of the group leaders at the Center for Brain and Cognition. In 2010 I received an individual Starting Grant from the ERC. Currently, the MRG group works on basic and applied research projects supported by local (MINECO, AGAUR) and EU (ERC) funding agencies.


Research interests

Humans, like other animals, are endowed with a wide range of sensory capacities such as hearing, feeling, seeing, smelling... This rich variety of senses allows our brains to represent the surrounding environment with fidelity and precision, so that we can parse information, store it in memory and, react successfully as a function of events. However, to achieve coherent mental representations of the environment our brains must coordinate the distinct sources of sensory information effectively across their different temporal properties, spatial frames of reference, and encoding formats. I am interested in the neural and behavioural principles underlying the selection and integration of such multi-sensory information. To achieve this, I use an experimental approach based on psychophysics, a variety of neuroimaging methods to measure neural activity (EEG, fMRI), and brain stimulation techniques (TMS).

Selected publications

- Orpella, Joan; Ripolles, Pablo; Ruzzoli, Manuela; Amengual, Julia L.; Callejas, Alicia; Martinez-Alvarez, Anna; Soto-Faraco, Salvador; de Diego-Balaguer, Ruth 2020, 'Integrating when and what information in the left parietal lobule allows language rule generalization', Plos Biology, 18, 11, e3000895.  

- Ruzzoli, Manuela; McGuinness, Aoife; Moris Fernandez, Luis; Soto-Faraco, Salvador 2020, 'From cognitive control to visual incongruity: Conflict detection in surrealistic images', Plos One, 15, 6, e0224053.

- Soto-Faraco, Salvador 2020, 'Reply to C. Spence: Multisensory Interactions in the Real World', Multisensory Research, 33, 6, 693 - 699.

- Spence, C., & Soto-Faraco, S. 2020. Crossmodal Attention Applied: Lessons for and from Driving (Elements in Perception). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Selected research activities

Editorial board member: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (APA)

Master of Brain and Cognition co-coordinator.

Scientific coordinator of the the RIS3CAT programme Cluster Emergent del Cervell Humà