Pablo Solana

🚨🚨 We are hiring a Postdoc at CIMCYC – University of Granada (Spain) 🚨🚨

2 year position in Neuroscience of Human Experience

Building new ways to study lived experience as it unfolds in time and maps onto brain, body and behavior

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Psicólogos de la UMA descubren por qué el cerebro repite conductas incluso cuando no queremos La investigación demuestra que el “piloto automático” del cerebro puede generar errores o ralentizar nuestras respuestas en situaciones de cambio. | Cadena SER

Entrevista en @sermalaga.bsky.social sobre nuestro reciente artículo en Behavior Research Methods link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Action and abstraction: Motor interference changes meaning in language understanding Can the body shape meaning? Eight experiments (four preregistered) tested whether interfering with the motor system changes how people interpret langu…

I'm so excited to share our new paper! 🎉 After ten years in the making, it's finally out in Journal of Memory and Language!

We present preliminary evidence that perturbing motor activity shapes how people conceptualize the meaning of action sentences.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Shoutout to all the co-authors: Omar Escámez, Gabriella Vigliocco (@gabriellavigliocco.bsky.social), Daniel Casasanto, and Julio Santiago!

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These results provide the first evidence that perturbing motor system activity influences how people think about the meaning of sentences, supporting embodied semantics approaches. Yet, not all experiments yielded significant results, warranting caution in interpreting our findings.

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With short delays, participants chose more concrete interpretations of sentences involving the same effector used to perform the rhythm. With long delays, this pattern reversed: participants preferred more abstract interpretations when the effector of the rhythm and the sentences matched.

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We also manipulated the temporal delay ⏳ between the sentences and their interpretations: short (200 ms) vs. long (15 s).

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Participants tapped a complex rhythm with their hands/feet and chose between two interpretations of sentences describing hand/foot actions (e.g., "scoring a goal"): one more concrete (e.g., "kicking a ball" ⚽🦶) and one more abstract (e.g., "winning a match" 🥳📈).

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Previous studies supporting a causal role of the motor system in action language comprehension have focused on quantitative changes in RTs and accuracy. Could perturbing motor activity lead to *qualitative* changes in language understanding, causing the same sentences to mean different things?

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Action and abstraction: Motor interference changes meaning in language understanding Can the body shape meaning? Eight experiments (four preregistered) tested whether interfering with the motor system changes how people interpret langu…

I'm so excited to share our new paper! 🎉 After ten years in the making, it's finally out in Journal of Memory and Language!

We present preliminary evidence that perturbing motor activity shapes how people conceptualize the meaning of action sentences.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/7

Thank you so much, Veronica!! 🥰

My pleasure, Pablo! Congratulations!

Congratulations @p-solana.bsky.social ! Brilliant defense of an excellent thesis. 👏👏👏

Thank you so much!!

Many thanks to the members of the committee as well: Daniela Paolieri, Miguel Vadillo (@mavadillo.bsky.social), Daniel Sanabria (@danielsanabria.bsky.social), Véronique Boulenger (@vero-boulenger.bsky.social), and Penny Pexman (@pennypexman.bsky.social)

Yesterday, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation and became Dr. Solana! 😳

Many thanks to all the lovely people who supported me in such a special day and through these 4 years of hard work 💜

The doctoral dissertation defense of Pablo Solana, titled 🧠 "Grounding meaning in the sensorimotor system: behavioral, neurostimulation and meta-analytic studies," is scheduled for January 30.

Congratulations to both researchers on reaching this milestone!

Por otro lado, la defensa de la tesis doctoral de Pablo Solana, titulada 🧠 "Grounding meaning in the sensorimotor system: behavioral, neurostimulation and meta-analytic studies", está programada para el próximo 30 de enero.

¡Felicidades a ambos investigadores por alcanzar este importante hito!

Happy to have contributed to this amazing collaborative effort!

Replicating the unconscious working memory effect: a multisite Registered Report Abstract. Although in recent years some studies have found evidence suggesting that working memory (WM) may operate on unconscious perceptual contents, dec

So happy this is finally out, almost 4 years in the making!
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

A celebration of open and collaborative science:
📜Replicating the unconscious working memory effect: a multisite Registered Report

Thank you so much to the 48 coauthors of the uWM project!🇬🇦

Drowsiness alters the neural dynamics but not the core computations of multisensory integration Fluctuations in alertness shape perception and behaviour, yet how they affect the brain’s ability to integrate information across senses remains poorly understood. Here we investigated whether multise...

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Multisensory integration is often described as basic, robust, even ✨“cognitively impenetrable” ✨

But does the brain still bind the senses when alertness drops? 😴🧠

🔗 We tested this during natural sleep onset:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thread below 👇

Two years ago, I had an idea, one that evolved over time as I kept reading and learning. Today, a major first part of that idea has just become my first PhD preprint, now publicly available on PsyArxiv.

Let me tell you a bit more about the story behind it... while I prepare the submission.

In Granada next week? Join us for the CIMCYC Workshop on Learning and Attention, with @davluque.bsky.social, @mavadillo.bsky.social, Teodóra Vékony and @mikelepelley.bsky.social discussing how learning and attention interact across different domains.
franfrutos.github.io/learning_att...

This outreach article stems from a paper originally published in
@psicologicajournal.bsky.social. Congratulations to the authors! It is the first to take this step within our new collaboration with @cienciaconarte.bsky.social, encouraging and supporting authors in sharing their research.

Bridging Fields in Psychology and Neuroscience with Multidisciplinary Collaboration Strengthening collaboration to encourage novel research connections between scientific areas is central to the CIMCYC - María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence strategy . To encourage this, the CIMCYC has ...

@cimcyc.bsky.social is hiring!

SIX postdoc positions are coming up to dive into collaborative projects bridging together psychological science.

Amazing opportunity to boost a postdoc career in a cutting-edge research center with outstanding human teams!
👇🏽
cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...

YouTube video by Philip Corr Hans Eysenck (1994) personality and cancer lecture

Have you seen George Davey Smith telling him the smoking findings were completely implausible at a seminar in Edinburgh 1994? youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

What does it mean to understand language? Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇

Assessing the validity evidence for habit measures based on time pressure - Behavior Research Methods Animal research has shown that repeatedly performing a rewarded action leads to its transition into a habit—an inflexible response controlled by stimulus–response associations. Efforts to reproduce th...

Happy to share our article now published in #psynomBRM w/@antovami.bsky.social, @frangfr.bsky.social & @davluque.bsky.social. We tested the replicability, reliability, and convergent validity of two promising paradigms for measuring habitual control.
📄 doi.org/10.3758/s134...
short 🧵 below

YouTube video by Psicometríes Documental "Paciencia Pa La Ciencia" - Próximamente...

Por si la maravilla de Ecuación Triunfo no hubiese sido suficiente... Vuelve Psicometríes Temporada 3:
👩‍🔬PACIENCIA PA' LA CIENCIA🪴
Una docu-serie sobre nuestra vida como predocs:
youtu.be/Bq2jfRphg9Y
[subtítulos disponibles]

Just for the record, new preprint out! In a project led by the wonderful @aliciafrancomnez.bsky.social (w/ Alicia Ferrer-Mendieta, Carmen Peiro-Lanchares, and @mavadillo.bsky.social), we test how different manipulations affect the response validity of the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS).