Dr Beatriz Gil Gómez de Liaño
About
I received my PhD in 2005 at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM, Spain) in Experimental Psychology studying Attention and Working Memory in healthy adults. During my postdoctoral training I was working with Dr Carlo Umiltà at Università degli Studi di Padova in 2008 studying attention in Traumatic Brain Injury Patients; with Dr Molly Potter at the MIT (José Castillejo Scholarship, Spanish Governement) in 2011 studying Attention in RSVP tasks; and with Dr. Jeremy Wolfe at the BWH-Harvard Medical in 2015 (Fulbright Scholar), studying Working Memory effects in Visual Search.
I have recently been re-awarded a Fulbright Scholarship as Senior Researcher (Salvador de Madariaga Spanish Government) for 6 months in 2018, in the Visual Attention Lab at the BWH-Harvard Medical with Dr Jeremy Wolfe, continuing our studies in Visual Search. I am also Associate Professor at UAM, teaching Methods in Psychology in the Department of Methodology and Social Psychology, UAM.
In the Adaptive Brain Lab I will do research with Prof. Zoe Kourtzi at the University of Cambridge, jointly with Dr. Jeremy Wolfe (BWH-Harvard Medical School) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow (MSCA). In the MSCA project we will study Attention and Working Memory processes in Children by means of a new Hybrid-Foraging paradigm of Visual Search.
Outside of the lab I’m married and we have a lovely family with three children: two boys and a girl of ages 10, 8 and 5.
Research
My main research interest is to understand how attention and working memory function in visual search tasks; how our cognitive system is able to perform visual search tasks in different types of environments from lab simulated conditions to real world scenes and daily situations during our lifetime. My current projects are focused on children. I would like to understand when and how these mechanisms start and operate in a developmental brain. Essentially, I would like to know how they change through typical and atypical attentional development, in order to understand how we can modulate them to design new treatments to improve them. To do this, we use experimental methods, eye recording and fMRI techniques.