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 (FPU). 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 with 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 obtained a Ramon and Cajal research fellowship to return to Granada, where I currently work.

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 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 others interact with it. We are characterizing the neural bases of these dissociations and interactions (see Chica et al., Cerebral Cortex, 2013; Chica et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2012; Chica et al., Scientific Reports, 2016).

webpage: https://blogs.ugr.es/attentionandconsciousness/

Web personal: https://blogs.ugr.es/attentionandconsciousness/