Associate Professor since 2000

Dr. Marta Vergara-Martínez obtained her Bachelor degree in Psychology (Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science) at the Complutense University of Madrid and her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of La Laguna. She is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Developmental Psychology at the University of València, where she arrived in 2011.

Marta is the current director of the Interdisciplinary Research Structure ERI-LECTURA.

The ERI-LECTURA brings together different lines of research in READING COMPREHENSION, among others (learning, disorders, literature, digital contexts, neuroscience of reading, etc.)

Previously, she spent 4 years as Postdoc Researcher (two years as Fulbright Postdoc) at the University of California, Davis, where she carried out research on Psycholinguistics & Psychophysiology (EEG and ERP studies) under the supervision of Prof. Tamara Y. Swaab.

Marta’s expertise is on Psycholinguistics, Neuroimaging Techniques –mainly the recording and analysis of EEG and ERPs in combination with behavioral methods and Eye Movements technique - , reading acquisition and visual word recognition.

Marta’s current lines of research include a series of topics relating to: 1) psycholinguistics: disentangling perceptual vs. lexical effects in the early stages of visual word recognition; disentangling the impact of contextual diversity vs. raw frequency variables on learning new vocabulary; connecting parameters of computational models of Lexical Decision to their electrophysiological correlates; 2) Reading comprehension in special populations: orthographic and phonological encoding during the early stages of word reading in deaf readers (see our most recent publication on SCIENTIFIC REPORTS-NATURE); reading comprehension of figurative language in young readers with ASD.

Finally, in collaboration with some colleagues at the Department of Developmental Psychology, we are carrying out research to disentangle the positive effects of paper-based vs digital reading, as shown by a recent paper of 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