Fitxa persona

Dr. Marta Vergara-Martínez obtained her Bachelor's Degree in Psychology (Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Sciences) from the Complutense University of Madrid and earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of La Laguna (2007). She has been a faculty member since September 2011 in the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Valencia. Since October 2025, she has held the position of Full Professor.

Marta is currently the Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Structure ERI-LECTURA. ERI-LECTURA brings together different lines of research on reading comprehension, among others: learning, disorders, literature, digital contexts, neuroscience of reading, etc.

Previously, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher (2008–2011: two years as a Fulbright Postdoc and two years under contract) at the University of California, Davis (USA), where she conducted psycholinguistic and psychophysiological research (EEG and ERP studies) under the supervision of Prof. Tamara Y. Swaab.

Marta’s expertise focuses on psycholinguistics, neuroimaging techniques—mainly the recording and analysis of EEG and ERPs, in combination with behavioral methods and eye-tracking techniques—, as well as reading acquisition and visual word recognition.

Her current lines of research include several topics related to:

1. The relationship between executive functions and literacy learning from a longitudinal perspective. Dissociating perceptual vs. lexical effects in the early stages of visual word recognition; examining the impact of contextual diversity vs. frequency in vocabulary learning; linking parameters from computational models of lexical decision with their EEG correlates.

2. Reading comprehension in special populations, including orthographic and phonological encoding during word reading in deaf readers (see, e.g., SCIENTIFIC REPORTS-NATURE, and figurative language comprehension in young readers with ASD.

Finally, in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Valencia, she investigates the facilitating effects of reading on paper vs. digital formats, as shown in a recent publication by this team:

Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., Salmerón, L., & Ibáñez, A. B. (2018). "Don't throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension." Educational Research Review, 25, 23–38.NEUROPAPEL-BBVA