Antonio Ferrer joined the University of Valencia in 1992 with a research fellowship in the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, where he has developed his academic career. His research focuses on two main areas: the intersection of technology, education and disability, and the design of psycholinguistic assessment instruments.

Between 1995 and 2003, within the Research Unit Acceso, he took part in projects funded by the European Social Fund that promoted the establishment of the student disability support service at the University of Valencia and the development of adaptation materials for psychoeducational assessment and for improving reading comprehension in individuals with prelingual profound deafness. In 2009, he joined the research group Psicotext, specialized in reading studies, collaborating on projects that led to the creation of two intelligent tutors for reading comprehension training. Subsequently, with the creation of ERI Lectura, he became a member of the Atypical group, focused on language and reading development in clinical populations (primarily intellectual disability, deafness, and ASD).

His teaching has been mainly related to neurodevelopmental disorders, special educational needs, and speech and language therapy, with experience in the training of teachers, psychologists, and speech therapists. He is also involved in postgraduate education, contributing to the master’s programs in special education and in speech and language intervention. He began his teaching career in 1995 as an assistant lecturer in a university school, and in 2000 obtained the position of Associate Professor.

In the field of academic management, he has served as director of the departmental section of developmental and educational psychology at the University School of Teacher Training Ausiàs March, secretary of the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, vice-dean of studies at the Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy of the University of Valencia, and dean of this Faculty since March 2021. Since May 2023, he has been President of the Conference of Deans of Psychology of Spanish Universities.

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