Principal Investigators
Jorge Almeida
I grew up in Lisbon, Portugal, where I received my BA in Psychology (2003; Faculty of Psychology, University of Lisbon). There I worked with Leonel Garcia Marques on topics of person perception, and Paulo Ventura on semantic memory. I then moved to Cambridge MA, USA, where I did my PhD (and MA) in Psychology at the Department of Psychology Harvard University (2011) with Alfonso Caramazza in the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory and Ken Nakayama in the Vision Sciences Lab. I focused on the kinds of information that are processed unconsciously under continuous flash suppression, and on the processing of tools/manipulable objects. After my PhD I started working on the neural processing of tool items, focusing on how different types of tool-related information are processed in the brain and on how tool-related regions modulate the signal in other tool-related regions.
I am currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences – University of Coimbra, Portugal. I am now focusing on how object-related information is mapped in the brain and how local object-selectively is defined within domain-specific networks via long-range connectivity. To do so I use fMRI, neuromodulation and behavioural testing. I am currently the PI or Co-PI in 4 FCT research projects, and the PI of the first ERC grant in the field of Psychology in Portugal – ContentMAP. My core research topics are cognitive neuroscience, object recognition, neural organization of conceptual knowledge, category specificity in the brain, neuroplasticity, and effects of neurostimulation on neural processing. To address these questions, I have the pleasure of collaborating with fantastic researchers around the world namely Bradford Mahon and the CAOs Lab now at Carnegie Mellon University; Angelika Lingnau at Regensburg University; Yanchao Bi and Fang Fang at Beijing Normal University and Peking University respectively; Mel Goodale and Jody Culham at Western University, among others.
Most importantly, I have been fortunate to have the help of an outstanding group of researchers at the Proaction Lab – you can meet them below!
Óscar Gonçalves
Óscar F. Gonçalves is currently a Full Professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal and a Senior Research Associate at the Spaulding Neuromodulation Center, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital-Harvard Medical School. He held faculty positions at the University of California Santa Barbara (Assistant Professor) and Northeastern University (Full Professor and Chair of Applied Psychology). He graduated in Psychology from the University of Porto in Portugal, completed two doctoral degrees: one from the Counseling School and Consulting Psychology Program, University of Massachusetts, Amherst – USA; and another one in Neurosciences from the Faculty of Medicine - University of Santiago de Compostela – Spain.
Óscar Gonçalves is a licensed Clinical and Health Psychologist with board certifications in neuropsychology and psychotherapy. He was the founder and Director of the Neuropsychophysiology Lab (currently Psychological Neuroscience Lab) where he has been systematically researching the neural correlates of a variety of cognitive-emotional processes in different psychiatry and neurological conditions.
He is currently the Director of the Master in Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Coimbra and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology (Elsevier). He is also a member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon.
He is a senior PI at the Proaction lab and directs a research group dedicated to the neuroscientific study of consciousness (CO&MA).
Post-Doctoral Researchers
André Peres
André Peres holds a degree in Medical Physics from the University of São Paulo (2005), a Master's (2008) and PhD (2012) from the same University. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Brain Institute - UFRN (2012-2016) and worked as an assistant professor at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neurosciences - Santos Dumont Institute (2016-2019). Currently, he is a Junior Researcher at PROACTION Lab.
André's academic interests are centred on the dynamics of sensory processing, the integration between sensory systems and how environmental information is perceived by individuals. In human studies, he has used fMRI combined with machine learning techniques to understand how semantic categories are organized in the brain. In animal models, he used the electrophysiology technique with multi-electrode matrices. André has been also developing methods for brain stimulation as a neuronavigation system and protocols to assess the mismatch between the measured and nominal parameters of TMS. Find out more about him here.
Fredrik Bergström
Fredrik Bergström obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (Sep. 2016), MSc in Psychology, BSc in Cognitive Science, AS in Philosophy, and AS in Business Administration from Umeå University (Sweden). During his PhD, he studied subliminal working memory with Johan Eriksson and Lars Nyberg. After that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Jorge Almeida's Proaction Lab, where he focused on visual object recognition and the organization of conceptual knowledge. Currently, he is a principal investigator leading a research group on value-based (economic, social, or moral) decision-making.
Fredrik is using psychophysics, neuroimaging (MRI/fMRI), and neuromodulation techniques to address questions on value-based (economic, social, or moral) decision-making, such as: (i) what is the relationship between personality traits and value-based choice? (ii) What are the (structural and functional) neural mechanisms underlying value-based choice? (iii) Can neural mechanisms be used to predict future choice at the individual or population level? (iv) What is the relationship between conscious awareness and value-based choice?
Gabriel Besson
Gabriel Besson received a Master’s degree in computer science engineering specializing in image and signal processing at the University of Rennes (France) and an MSc oriented towards Cognitive Science at the University of Paris XI (France). Moving to cognitive neuroscience, he did his Ph.D. in collaboration with the University of Toulouse and the University of Aix-Marseille (France), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Liège (Belgium), investigating familiarity for visual objects (the acontextual feeling of pre-exposure) and the role of the first cortical regions affected in Alzheimer's disease. To this aim, he had the chance to work with healthy and pathological populations and to use various neuroimaging approaches, like sMRI, PET, EEG, or resting-state fMRI.
Gabriel's general interest in visual object representations and how they transfer into knowledge and memory has led him to focus on how the brain does so, during the few hundreds of milliseconds following object presentation, in a way that could allow individual-level object recognition. At the Proaction lab, he is currently addressing this question using multivariate computational techniques and EEG during visual object perception.
Xingnan Zhao
Xingnan Zhao received her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (July 2023), an MSc in Developmental Psychology from Peking University (China), and a BSc in Psychology from China University of Political Science and Law. During her master's studies, she investigated children's cognition and reading development. For her PhD, she focused on the neuronal and computational mechanisms of visual perception, using two-photon calcium imaging on awake macaques. She also conducted psychophysical experiments to explore perceptual learning and the transfer of time perception in human adults.
Currently, Xingnan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Proaction Lab. Her main academic interests focus on how object knowledge is organized and represented both neurally and cognitively, using psychophysics, fMRI, and machine learning methods.
Zohar Tal
Zohar Tal obtained her PhD in Neurobiology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). In her thesis, Zohar studied principles of topographic organization, focusing on the somatosensory and visual systems and their cross-modal correspondence. Following, Zohar was a postdoctoral fellow in Tel-Aviv University (Israel), where she studied behavioural and neural adaptations of fruit bats to urban life. This project included the application of different functional and structural MRI methods to characterize the neural correlates underlying urban behavioural adaptations of fruit bat pups during their first navigation experience.
Currently, Zohar is a postdoctoral fellow at the Proaction lab, and her main research focuses on the topographic organization of sensory information and higher cognitive functions. As part of the ContentMAP project, Zohar is using various phase-locked and population receptive field (pRF) methods to explore the topographic principles that govern the organization of object knowledge in the brain.
PhD Students
Filipa Dourado Sotero
Filipa Dourado Sotero is a neurology specialist at Hospital Santa Maria – Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte - Lisbon, Portugal. She received her master's degree in Medicine from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra. Since the beginning of her career she has endeavoured to combine clinical and academic training. During her residency, Filipa developed a particular interest in cognitive and behavioural neurology, especially the study of apraxia. She is actively engaged in clinical and research activities related to actions, object use and object recognition.
Igor Vaz
Igor Vaz received a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Paraiba (Brazil), and a Master's in Neuroengineering at Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neurosciences (Brazil). In his master's he focused on signal processing of fMRI data, Computer Vision and Deep Learning, which drove his interest in state of the art research about Artificial Neural Networks for modelling the human visual system.
In the past 4 years he was working as a Machine Learning Engineer in the fields of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, developing solutions for the Restaurants, 3D Design, Agriculture and Public Surveillance sectors.
Igor has recently begun his PhD studies in the area of Explainable Multimodal Deep Neural Networks at the University of Coimbra, in the Proaction Lab. The focus of his research is to predict the cognitive performance of elderly individuals in the near future using artificial intelligence techniques. By developing models that can analyze and interpret data from multiple modalities (such as brain imaging, behavioral assessments, and medical records), he aims to detect abnormal cognitive decline at an early stage, which can potentially improve the quality of life of the elderly and reduce the burden on the healthcare system. His work also has the potential to reveal new insights into the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying cognitive decline in aging, which can inform the development of new interventions and treatments. With his strong background in electrical engineering, neuroengineering, and machine learning, Igor is well-equipped to tackle this challenging and important research problem.
Joana Sayal
Joana obtained her BA in Psychology from the University of Coimbra, and in 2022 she finished the Interuniversity Master in Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology from the Universities of Lisbon, Coimbra, and Minho. She has been a student collaborator at Proaction Laboratory since October 2017, assisting research by collecting and analysing experimental data. Her first experience was in a neuromodulation project involving transcranial direct current stimulation and its effect on anxiety, and then she started focusing on the topic that later became her master thesis: neuroplasticity in congenitally deaf adults, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and population receptive field analysis.
Currently, Joana is a PhD student integrated in the CO&MA Team of Proaction Lab. As a trained musician herself (cello), she focuses on the effects of music/sound on consciousness and cognition.
Find more about her here.
Miguel Baião
Miguel Baião received his BSc in Psychology from the Faculty of Psychology (ULisboa), and his MSc in Neuroscience from the Faculty of Medicine (ULisboa). In his master thesis, he studied personality-based differences in the processing of subliminal affective stimuli, and the associated ERPs. Currently, Miguel is a PhD Candidate at the Doctoral Program in Cognitive Science (ULisboa).
His PhD work, supervised by Jorge Almeida and Gabriel Besson, focuses on the application of EEG and RSA to study the processing of tools at the type and token levels. His interests include unconscious versus conscious processing, conversion of visual maps into motor maps, topographic organization of information in the brain, and decoding of EEG signals. Find out more about him here.
Nadya Murziakova
Nadya Murziakova got a master's degree from the University of Trento, Italy, with a major in Cognitive neuroscience. Before that, she obtained her Bachelor's degree in Psychology with a major in Cognitive Psychology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia).
In her studies, Nadya focuses on processes of visual perception, including methods such as fMRI, eye-tracking, and behavioral studies to understand how visual information is organized and represented in the brain.
Pedro Palhares
Pedro has an integrated double MSc in Psychology from the University of Minho (Portugal) and the University of Lille (France), specializing in neuropsychology and cognitive-affective
Pedro’s current work aims to investigate the structure and configuration of consciousness during mind-wandering, aesthetic absorption, creative thinking and other altered states of consciousness. He combines transcranial magnetic stimulation with electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) to directly probe both local and widespread changes in brain neurophysiology during these states as they occur in music listening and musical performance.
Stephanie Kristensen
Stephanie received her BSc and MSc in Psychology at the Maastricht University (Netherlands). After graduation, she joined the Proaction Lab as a research assistant on a project supported by FCT investigating tool recognition using functional MRI and psychophysics. The work aimed at understanding how low-level segregation in the visual system influences high-level object representations. Currently, she is studying for a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology at the Proaction lab.
Her research interests include visual perception, object recognition, and neuroimaging. Specifically, she is using functional MRI and behavioural measures to understand the cognitive representation and functional organization of manipulable objects in the healthy human brain.
Research Assistants
Beatriz Janicas
Beatriz Janicas did her Bachelor's in Psychology and a Cognitive Neuropsychology Research Master's at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She discovered her passion for Neurosciences during her studies at the University of Coimbra, and she knew since then that she wanted to do neuropsychological research and later teach. She's intrigued by how language changes our perception of the world and how humans make decisions. For the past year, she has been a part of the Junior Researcher Programme, investigating the interplay between metabolic state, impulsivity, self-control, and their combined effects on risk-seeking behaviour.
She is working within the CogBooster project in research on language deficits and also helping with other research tasks at the Proaction Lab.
José Gomes
José Gomes graduated in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Aveiro in 2022 and completed his Master's degree in Biomedical Research at the University of Coimbra in 2024. With a deep-rooted interest in neuroscience, José has long been fascinated by philosophical questions about the human brain, such as how we think, form memories, and experience emotions, and more recently, how we perceive and recognize objects in the visual world. This curiosity fuels his passion to understand the mind and explore the tools that allow us to study its complex processes.
During his Master's thesis, José worked with fMRI data and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns of neural activity. Now, as a Research Assistant at Proaction Lab, he aims to continue developing his expertise in cognitive neuroscience and machine learning, applying these techniques to further investigate how the brain processes visual information and recognizes objects.
Luca Serrière
Luca Serrière has obtained a BSc in Psychology and a MSc in Neuropsychology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He has conducted research concerning visual cognitive processing of simple stimuli, identifying biases and completion strategies of partially occluded objects.
He is now a research assistant at the Proaction Lab and also part of the CogBooster Junior Team.
Science Communicators
Mariana Coimbra
Mariana Coimbra obtained her BA and Master’s degree in Communication and Journalism from the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and she's now doing a PhD in Communication Sciences. She worked as a journalist in national newspapers like Público (as a trainee) and in Expresso. Shortly after, Mariana developed an interest in corporate communication and became a Communication Specialist, working in different areas. For more than a decade Mariana was a Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility Manager of a Health Clinic. Mariana is now working on the communication and project management of the Lab.
Collaborators
Diâner Felipe Queiroz
Diâner Felipe received his bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Aveiro (Portugal). Since the beginning of his undergraduate studies, he has been involved in research activities and gained practical experience working on a project about the impact of chronotype and time-of-day on facial recognition at the NeuroLab - Department of Education and Psychology from University of Aveiro. Additionally, he was selected for the Scientific Initiation Program for Psychology Students (PIC-PSI) at the same university, where he contributed to culturally adapt a cognitive rehabilitation program specifically for cancer survivors from the USA to Portugal and to adapt the program to a digital platform.
Currently pursuing his Master's in Clinical Neuropsychology: Assessment and Rehabilitation at the University of Coimbra, his main interests lie in the domains of cognitive neuroscience and scientific communication. At the Proaction Lab, he is involved in a project about Moral Dilemmas and is currently working on his master thesis using neuroimaging data and machine learning techniques to predict economic decisions from brain structure.Find more about him here.
Ema Leitão
Ema Leitão graduated in Psychological Sciences at the University of Coimbra and is currently a student of the Master’s in Clinical Neuropsychology: Assessment and Rehabilitation. She wishes to pursue Neuropsychology and she has been collaborating with Proaction Lab since the second year of her bachelor's, where she collected and analyzed data from behavioral experiments. So far, she has collaborated on a project involving the organization of object knowledge in the brain. At the moment, she's focused on developing her programming skills and learning more about neuroimaging techniques.
Marta Parravicini
Marta Parravicini graduated with a bachelor's degree in Psychological Sciences and Techniques from the University of Bergamo, Italy. During this time, she had the privilege of participating in a curricular workshop titled "Emotions and Neurosciences," which sparked her curiosity about the field of neuroscience. After completing her degree, Marta enrolled at the University of Milan, where she pursued her master's studies in Cognitive Sciences, dedicating her second year to research. During this period, Marta had the opportunity to meet Professor Monica Maria Grazia DiLuca, Director of the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences at UNIMI, to whom she owes the passion for this subject.
She is currently undertaking an Erasmus traineeship at the ProactionLab under Professor Jorge Almeida, with the aim of conducting an experimental thesis and completing her master's studies, aspiring to find her place in the field of neuroscientific research.
Natália Domingos Rodrigues
Natália graduated with a bachelor's degree in Psychology from the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) and is currently a Master's student at the Cellular and Molecular Biology program from Universidade de Coimbra, as part of the the Neurasmus program, an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree. She did her first year at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, where she further expanded her knowledge in fundamental neuroscience and gathered experience with different methods, such as ICA and TMS.
Currently, she is interested in understanding the role played by the properties of different materials and animacy in object recognition.
Patrícia Fernandes
Ana Patrícia Fernandes graduated in Psychological Sciences at the University of Coimbra and is currently a student of the Master’s in Clinical Neuropsychology: Assessment and Rehabilitation. She’s collaborating to learn more about the area in a professional environment, to this end she also had a summer internship at the Lab. She is currently collaborating on a research for a master's thesis on Near-Death Experiences (in the CO&MA Team), on a project about Economic Decisions, one on Moral Dilemmas and another on Art Emblems. Over her collaboration on these projects, she collected and analyzed data, using techniques such as tDCS, eyetracking and EEG.
She is still trying to find her way and specific interests in such a vast and diverse area.
Sophia Bertoni
Sophia Bertoni graduated in Psychological Sciences at the University of Coimbra and is currently a student of the Master's in Clinical Neuropsychology: Assessment and Rehabilitation. Her interest in neuroscience has been nurtured since the beginning of her bachelor's degree, with her main interests being the consciousness and the link between psychological processes and arising technologies, such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
Currently, Sophia is doing her master's thesis on out-of-body experiences and is involved in a project on how the representations are organized in the brain, based on its real size. She also is a member of the CO&MA team.
Roberto dos Santos
Roberto dos Santos received a BSc in Human Physiology, Genetics and Psychology from the University of Pretoria (South Africa) with a BScHons in Neurophysiology, where he worked on classifying and predicting visual skills performance between athletes and sedentary individuals. Currently a master’s student in Molecular and Translational Neurosciences at the University of Coimbra, he is fascinated by memory, neurodegenerative diseases, and artificial intelligence. He has joined ProAction Lab to study fMRI biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and is committed to developing his knowledge and skills regarding neuroimaging, programming, and deep learning.
