Ana Belén Chica Martínez

I obtained my BA in Psychology at the University of Granada in 2003. I joined the Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience PhD program at the University of Granada thanks to a PhD scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. I graduated with a Cum Laude in 2008 under the supervision of Dr. Juan Lupiáñez. During my PhD, I did several research stays at Oxford University (with Dr. Charles Spence, 5 months) and Dalhousie University (with Dr. Raymond Klein, 1 year). In 2008, I obtained a research contract from the Neuropôle de Recherche Francilien to work in an INSERM lab in Paris in collaboration with Dr. Paolo Bartolomeo. In 2009 I was awarded a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship (7th Framework Program of the European Union) to pursuit my research at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. In 2012 I returned to Granada with a Ramón and Cajal research fellowship. I am currently a Full Professor at the University of Granada, since 2019. During my career, I have contributed to the training of young researchers, having supervised 7 doctoral theses (plus 2 in progress), approximately 24 master theses, and about 25 undergraduate theses.
My main research topic is the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention and Conscious Perception. I am interested in understanding the neural basis of different forms of attention and how they relate to our conscious experience. I have explored these topics both in the healthy and the damaged brain, with special interest in understanding the brain as an entity composed of large-scale neural networks, connected by long-range white matter tracts. I apply different methodologies to the study of healthy individuals and brain damaged patients, such as behavioural psychophysics, oculo-motor and electro-encephalogram recordings, magnetic resonance imaging, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
My main contributions to the literature can be summarised as follows: 1) we have demonstrated that endogenous and exogenous attention consist of two independent processes, implemented in different nodes of the fronto-parietal network (see Chica et al., Behavioural Brain Research, 2013); 2) we have demonstrated that some attentional systems can be dissociated from conscious perception, while some other interact with it. We have explored the neural bases of these dissociations and interactions (see Martín-Signes et al., Cerebral Cortex, 2019; Chica et al., Scientific Reports, 2016). 3) We have contributed to the understanding of the susceptibility to neuromodulation in the healthy brain, by exploring white matter individual variability (Martín-Signes et al., Cortex, 2021, Martín-Signes et al., Cerebral Cortex, 2017).
webpage: https://blogs.ugr.es/attentionandconsciousness/