Professor Juan Lupiáñez Castillo, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) in 2023 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (for more information about the 2023 call, please consult:(http://sl.ugr.es/0d7F)

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR) was founded in 1531 and is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. With over 51,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students and almost 3,000 members of staff, the UGR offers over 90 undergraduate degrees, 160 master’s degrees (8 of which are international double degrees) and 28 doctoral programmes via its 124 departments and nearly 50 centers. Accordingly, the UGR offers one of the most extensive and diverse ranges of higher education programmes in Spain.

The UGR has been awarded with the "Human Resources Excellence in Research (HRS4R)", which reflects the institution’s commitment to continuously improving its human resource policies in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The UGR is also internationally renowned for its excellence in diverse research fields and ranked among the top Spanish universities in a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, and international funding.

The UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking - Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The 2022 edition of the ARWU places the UGR in 201-300th position in the world and as the 2-5 highest ranked universities in Spain (http://sl.ugr.es/0d7D), reaffirming its position as an institution at the forefront of national and international research. The UGR stands out in the specialties of Library & Information Science (position 38); Food Science & Technology (30) and Hospitality & Tourism Management (51-75), according to the latest edition of this prestigious ranking by specialties (http://sl.ugr.es/0bSp). A little lower in the ranking, the UGR also stands out in Mathematics (76-100).

Additionally, the UGR has 9 researchers who are at the top of the Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list (http://sl.ugr.es/0d7E), most of these related to the area of Computer Science. It is also well recognized for its web presence (http://sl.ugr.es/0a6i), being positioned at 42th place in the top 200 Universities in Europe.

Internationally, the University of Granada is firmly committed to its participation in the calls of the Framework Programme of the European Union. For the duration of the last Framework Programme, Horizon 2020, the UGR obtained a total 120 projects with a total funding of around 29,4 million euros.  For the current Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, the UGR has obtained 38 projects, so far, with total funding around 11 € million.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group:

The University of Granada is the best Spanish university in the field of Psychology, as it is within the top universities 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), is 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 projects, 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. We are now investigating individual differences in Attention and Vigilance as a function of different variables: sport and musical training, mindfulness, ADHD symptoms, etc...

Research Area:

☒ Social Sciences and Humanities (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)