I am interested 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, I am currently interested in how goal-oriented behavioral programs interact with the environmental input, that is, how top-down processes interact with bottom-up, stimulus-driven processes.

A good example of this interaction is provided by involuntary attenion: unexpected novel stimuli can capture our attention involuntarily, provided thay they interact with the mental set of our ongoing activities. My current experiments manipulate distractor features, irrelevant stimulus-main taks contingencies, stimulus significance, and working memory load, and we measure brain activity, either as ERPs, MEG or more recently fMRI. And of course, I do keep some interest in how all these process can become altered in different states of brain pathology or mental disease, and this is why I still do clinical research, particularly in children suffering from different neurodevelopmental disorders.

Drawn on our previous experience and results, we are now undertaken new research challenges for the upcoming years.

First, in cooperation with Prof. Manfred Herrmann of University of Bremen and Prof. Mark Greenlee of University of Regensburg, both in Germany, we are trying to combine the more spacial accurate information on functional magetic resonance imaging with the better time resolution of biomagnetic brian signals to unraveal the spatio-temporal neurodynamics underlying auditory distraction.

We second are now jumping into a more “wet” cognitive neuroscience as we plan to take blood samples from our healthy volunteers in order to underpin the genetic determinants of distractibilty. This research is being conducte with Prof. Imma Clemente of our same Deparment of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona.

And third, since several electrophysiologic phenomena within the auditory system, as the mismatch negativity ERP, the gating (in and out) of the P50 middle latency auditory ERP, and the habituation and dishabituation of the so-called novelty neurons of the auditory pathway reflect change detection in the auditory input, we now are trying to set the requirement and manifestations of a “novelty system” in audition. That general novelty system may subserve two cognitive functions in audition: 1) organization of the auditory input in meaningful chunks of information, and 2) drawing attention involuntarily.