Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group
The Brainlab, led by Carles Escera, belongs to the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona and the Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu. We are located at the Faculty of Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology.
We are a small, multinational, interdisciplinary group, including psychologists, biologists, engineers, and physicists. We seek to unravel the brain mechanisms of cognitive functions, including attention, auditory and speech perception, motor-sensory interactions, and executive control. Also, we are interested in emotional and musical processing, and in cognitive dysfunction in a broad spectrum of neurological, neurodevelopment and mental disorders.
To achieve our goals, we combine the recording of the human electroencephalogram (EEG) to analyze evoked and event-related brain potentials (such as the Frequency-Following Response – FFR, the Middle Latency Response –MLR, or the Mismatch Negativity –MMN) and oscillatory brain activity, with magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neurogenetic analysis. Part of our research is conducted in collaboration with labs located worldwide, such as the University of Helsinki and University of Jyväskylä (Finland), the Fukushima Medical University (Japan), the University of Leipzig (Germany) and the University of Salamanca (Spain). We are committed to higher-education training, at Master (Neuroscience and Research in and Behavior and Cognition programs) and PhD (Biomedicine/Neurosciences) levels.
Research lines
Cognitive auditory neuroscience
Carles EsceraPredictive processes in motor-sensory interactions
Iria SanMiguelNeural dynamics of affective processing
Judith Domínguez-BorràsCoherent oscillations at pitch rates in sensorimotor integration and voice production
Jordi Costa FaidellaCognitive neurogenetics
Marc ViaNumerical cognition and math anxiety
Maria Isabel Nuñez-Peña
News
Brainlab is excited to announce two upcoming seminars in the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Barcelona, exploring the intersection of music, language, and cognitive neuroscience. These sessions offer a unique opportunity to learn about cutting-edge research and its implications for language development and perception. Dr. Julie Camici – “Using short-term musical rhythms to boost language perception and production [...]
09/04/2026
A new study from the Brainlab has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, as part of Emmanouela Kosteletou’s PhD research within the ERC project HumanSUBthreat, led by Judith Domínguez Borràs. The article, entitled ‘A direct auditory subcortical route to the amygdala associated with fear in humans’, provides the first evidence in humans for a direct subcortical auditory pathway linking [...]
19/03/2026
Researchers from the Brainlab have published a new research paper in Hearing Research examining how the human brain encodes speech in noisy environments. The paper, conducted as part of Giannina Puddu-Gallardo‘s doctoral thesis and led by PI Marc Via, explores the role of the Frequency-Following Response (FFR) as a neural biomarker of speech-in-noise (SIN) processing. The FFR closely reflects the spectro-temporal [...]
04/03/2026
