XXXV International Congress of the Spanish Society for Comparative Psychology (SEPC)

I hold a PhD in Psychology from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), where I work as an Associate Professor in the Department of Basic Psychological Processes and their Development. My career combines teaching, research, and educational innovation, with over 20 years of experience in university education and the development of competitive scientific projects. I am a member of the consolidated research group Learning and Cognition. My research focuses on the study of learning, perception, and attention processes, with particular interest in how we learn to differentiate similar stimuli through mere exposure—especially after experiencing only one of them—and how context and prior experience influence the acquisition and extinction of associations. I teach courses on cognitive processes, integrating active methodologies to promote practical and autonomous student learning and the development of their scientific competencies. I also teach in the research master’s program at the Faculty of Psychology and have coordinated several educational innovation projects.

Degree in Psychology and PhD from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), I am an associate professor in the Department of Basic Psychological Processes and their Development where I teach subjects on cognitive processes in different Degrees. I belong to the consolidated research group “Learning and Cognition” which develops competitive scientific projects in the field of basic processes. My research work within this group focuses on transferring the knowledge acquired in the learning of basic processes to a more applied framework also collaborating with the Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders Association

Peter Balsam is a Professor of Psychology at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is perhaps best known by members in the society for his fundamental research in timing (C/T) and associative learning. More generally, his work is aimed at understanding how animals and humans perceive and utilize temporal information to guide behavior. He has also contributed to our understanding of the role of context in learning and performance. More recently he has investigated neural mechanisms of how dopamine influences reward and motivational states. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Animal Learning and Behavior and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. He has also edited two books: Context and Learning (with A. Tomie) and the Behavioral Neuroscience of Motivation (with E. Simpson). His work aims to understand basic cognitive and behavioral processes so they can be translated into new strategies for diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Laura Corbit is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies the behavioral and neural control of instrumental and reward-seeking behaviors. She examines how different brain circuits contribute to distinct forms of learning (e.g., action-based goal direction vs. habit) and how experiences like drug exposure or diet alter learning and behavioral control. Her work on prediction-error based learning uses state-of-the-art optogenetics, fiber photometry, and behavioral analyses, to examine how locus coeruleus neurons contribute, showing that noradrenaline may play a role in specific aspects of prediction error and could offer insights into treating learning disabilities. She has also studied how an obesogenic diet impairs goal-directed control and may promote habit-like behavior.

Dr. Delamater is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His area of expertise is the study of associative learning. In addition to his recent textbook on the subject, The Essentials of Conditioning and Learning, co-authored with Michael Domjan, he has served as the Editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition and President of both the Eastern Psychological Association and the Pavlovian Society. His grant-funded research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological foundations of associative learning, with approaches at computational, behavioral, and neural circuit levels. He employs sophisticated behavioral methods, including reward devaluation, differential outcome, peak timing, and Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer tasks, alongside neurobiological techniques, to identify the neural representations and pathways responsible for encoding distinct sensory and temporal features of reward, to understand the underlying mechanisms of behavioral sequence learning, goal-directed actions and habits, and, more generally, to understand the mechanisms of neuroplasticity.

Milagros Gallo is Full Professor at the Department of Psychobiology of the University of Granada (Spain) and coordinator of the Research Group "Neuroplasticity and Learning (NEPLE)" http://neplegroup.com/. The research team brings together psychobiologists and learning psychologists performing interdisciplinary research in human and animal models in order to fully understand the mechanisms and processes involved in learning and memory. She has been former director of the Institute of Neurosciences “Federico Olóriz” (UGR), president of the European Chemoreception Research Organization (ECRO) and member of several scientific societies. She contributes to the scientific endeavor participating in scientific congresses, ethics and expert committees of Spanish and foreign agencies as well as being editor of scientific journals and supervising young talented researchers. Her research is focused on a developmental approach in rodent models, with special interest in adolescence and aging. As principal investigator of several consecutive projects she combines chemogenetics, immunohistochemisty, neuroimaging, and epigenetics to study how the individual brain is shaped by neural plasticity along the life.

Nathan Holmes is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and an American Psychological Association Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Psychology. Nathan is interested in how the mammalian brain processes different types of information; and how motivational states, like fear, affect that processing. Specifically, he examines how fear influences the processing of innocuous information (e.g., the relation between a sound and a light), how fear spreads across a network of linked memories, and how an established fear memory is updated to include new information. The aim of his research is to develop a theory of how fear influences information processing in the brain, with a particular focus on cells and circuits of the medial temporal lobe.