Facultad de Psicología

* Saccadic eye movements and their role in attention, spatial memory and the control of actions.
* Planning of sequences of movements vs. on-line control.
* Time needed for on-line adjustments of movements because of changes in the targets, presence of obstacles, etc.
* Eye-head-hand coordination.
* Object localisation during eye movements.

Áreas de especialización:

I am interested in perception, both from epistemological and experimental perspectives. Part of my pre-doctoral work focused on epistemological questions like the body-mind problem, the role of evolution in the development of psychological skills, and the relationships between the theories of perception and theories of knowledge. To those ends, I have explored the ideas of Marr, Gibson and Helmholtz, among others. Helmholtz´s works on visual perception of space and his theory of vision have focused my interests on subject´s  activity in vision, eg. eye movements, visual search, eye-head-hand co-ordinations and so forth.
On an experimental level I'm especially interested in the relationship between perception and action. Action seems to be an important element to understand perception. However, classic experiments on visual perception usually give the observer a passive role and this makes it difficult to understand how subjects deal with the same issues in real life, where they can have an active role. Action itself is much more complex and much more variable than most psychological theories assume (the general idea of "response", both in the behaviourist and the computational perspectives, does not consider the kinematic differences between otherwise "similar" actions). My work in the last years has focused on understanding what kind of visual information is used while executing a task depending on its requirements. I have explored how visual information is retained and used to guide saccadic eye movements in a block copying task, and also how fast can movements be adjusted after a change in the properties of the targets or the obstacles in the environment.