Soto-Faraco, Salvador
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
Social & Behavioural Sciences
Short biography
I graduated in Psychology (1994) and completed a PhD in Cognitive Science (1999) at Universitat de Barcelona. In my PhD I worked at the University of Oxford (UK), where I also stayed as a postdoc before moving to University of British Columbia (Canada) in 2000. 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).