Carles Escera

Professor and lab founder

I am Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Icrea Acadèmia Distinguished Professor since 2011 (calls 2010, 2015, 2020). I graduated in Psychology at the University of Barcelona in 1987, and after completing my PhD with the thesis in 1993, I had an atypical [scattered over a few years due to my teaching obligations] postdoctoral experience in Risto Näätänen’s laboratory at the University of Helsinki (1993, 1994, 1996, 1999). There I learned on the cerebral mechanisms of selective and involuntary auditory attention, as investigated with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Good old times where I met some very good friends with whom I still had enduring collaboration (Kimmo Alho, Erich Schröger, Istvàn Winkler, Hirooki Yabe). I have been fellow of the Hanse Wissenchaftkolleg (Delmenhosrt, Germany) and visiting professor at the University of Bremen (2004, 2005) and the University of Jyväskylä (Finland; 2022, 2024).

My research has focused on three separated but closely related research areas. First, we devised an experimental task to investigate the cerebral mechanisms of involuntary attention. In short, participants had to classify visual stimuli pertaining to two different categories, while ignoring preceding task-irrelevant sounds. When these latter change to deviant or novel, an increased response time in the primary visual task indicated behavioral distraction, which was underlined by a typical pattern in the ERPs, including the mismatch negativity (MMN), a Novelty-P3 and the Reorienting Negativity (RON; Escera, Alho, Winkler, Näätänen, 1998). Subsequent studies manipulated distracter features, irrelevant stimulus-main task contingencies, stimulus significance, emotional context or working memory load, and were applied to investigate involuntary attention deficits in a range of clinical conditions. The major outcome of this research was that involuntary attention is modulated by top-down factors (Escera and Corral, 2007). Fellows from that time are Iria SanMiguel (PhD 2008), Judith Domínguez-Borràs (PhD 2008), Jordi Costa-Faidella (PhD 2011), currently associate professors and principal investigators of the Brainlab; MJ Corral (PhD 2008, associate professor at my Department), Manuel Garcia-Garcia (PhD 2009), currently Global Research Strategy Leader at Ipsos, and Sonia do Vale (PhD 2016), Diretora do Programa Nacional para a Diabetes na Direção-Geral da Saúde (Portugal).

On a parallel account, I devoted research to improve the MMN as an objective index of auditory discrimination deficits in a range of neurological, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. The MMN is elicited when the current stimulus does not match a neural representation of the preceding acoustic regularity, and as such, it can index central sound representation and auditory discrimination, as well as the encoding of regularities to stimulus repetition (rule inference), and prediction error to mismatching stimuli. As an example, we found that persistent developmental stutterers have abnormal representation of speech sounds (Corbera et al., 2005). Together with Risto Näätänen and others we have published several review papers on the clinical applications of MMN (Näätänen and Escera, 2000; Näätänen et al., 2011; Näätänen et al., 2012). A fellow form that time is Sílvia Corbera (PhD 2005), associate professor at Yale University (USA).

Thereafter, and departing from the observation that neurons in the primary auditory cortex, the auditory thalamus and the inferior colliculus exhibit stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA), i.e., restore their firing rate to a deviant stimulus in a manner comparable to MMN behavior, my research demonstrated that deviance detection based on regularity encoding in a key principle of the functional organization of the auditory system. We recorded middle-latency (MLR) and frequency-following responses (FFR) or run MEG or fMRI experiments to find deviance-related responses at latency ranges and anatomical level comparable to those of the neurons exhibiting SSA (Escera and Malmierca, 2014; Escera et al., 2013). With Malmierca, we showed the hierarchical emergence of prediction errors along the auditory neuraxis (Parras et al., 2017). This research benefited from the collaborative ERANET-NEURON project funded by the 7th EU Framework project entitled “Probing the Auditory Novelty System”, which gathered researchers from Spain (Manuel S. Malmierca), Israel (Israel Nelken) and Finland (Minna Huotilainen) under my coordination. Fellows in this project were Dr. Sabine Grimm (2008-2013; now senior researcher at University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany), Dr. Sumie Leung (2011-2013), Dr. Raffaele Cacciaglia (2012-2014; now Team Leader at Barcelona Beta Brain Research Center), and Heike Althen (PhD 2014), Marc Recasens (PhD 2014), and Miriam Cornella (PhD 2015).

That project drove my fascination by a minute brain potential known as the Frequency-Following Response (FFR). The FFR captures with great fidelity the tracking accuracy of periodic sound features in the auditory midbrain, thalamus, (and cortex), so that one can read subcortical neural traces from the human scalp as sounds are transcribed in subcortical neuronal aggregates (Gorina-Careta et al., 2021), and how these soundtraces are shaped by experience and context (see Escera, 2023). Using the FFR, I have shown subcortical prediction errors (Slabu et al., 2012), the involvement of the serotonin transporter gen in accurate subcortical speech encoding (Selinger et al., 2016) and that timing predictability enhances subcortical regularity encoding (Gorina-Careta et al., 2016). This research has reinforced the emerging view that the involvement of the subcortical brain in auditory cognition (Escera, 2023).

Since 2017, I am currently deciphering with the FFR, the neural machinery implicated in encoding speech sounds across early development, from fetal life to age two, in the subcortical auditory system, a research program carried out at the Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu. We have established the standards for neonatal FFR recording in clinical settings (Ribas-Prats et al. 2019), discovered a developmental milestone (Puertollano et al. 2024), showed that compromised fetal development challenges the FFR at birth (Ribas-Prats et al. 2022, 2023, 2024) and that prenatal music exposure boosts neonatal pitch encoding (Arenillas-Alcón et al., 2023), and predicted neurodevelopmental outcomes at the age of two years by means of artificial intelligence applied to a newborn’s FFR (Escera & Valenzuela, patent submitted). Capitalizing on these achievements, we have propelled our technology transfer initiative, the ONAkids project, aiming at providing at solution for predicting neurodevelopmental derail in babies born at risk of language disorders, such as preterm, low-birth weight, and congenital heart disease. This initiative has received competitive funding from several knowledge and tech transfer programs, such as the Proof of Concept from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (call 2022), and the LLAVOR (call 2021) and PRODUCTE (call 2023) from the Catalan Government (AGAUR).

On Academy side, I am member of the Academia Europeae and the Principal Investigator of the Brainlab-Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (since 2003), I coordinated the Spanish Network in Cognitive Neuroscience (2008-2010), I was the founder director of the former Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior (IR3C) of the University of Barcelona (2009-2015), and the founding director of the Institue of Neurosciences of our university (2016-2017).

My full CV is here.

Catalan version