CV summary

I studied at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) where I presented my doctoral thesis on the effects of context on memory in 1989. I am currently a full professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) where I teach Memory and Decision Making. My entire research career has been linked to the study of memory in applied fields and with ecological validity. That is, a balance between experimental rigor and real life situations. In the last 10 years, I have supervised 5 theses (one of them with an extraordinary prize in Social Sciences and another international one). At present, I am directing 2 theses that will be defended soon. I have concatenated projects in competitive calls of three years of duration funded by the Spanish Ministry, with positive evaluations in all monitoring reports, since 2003 and I have three sexennials of research. I have collaborated as an expert in evaluation tasks of research projects of the Ministry, ANECA and the Leverhulme foundation of European projects.

Research lines

I am interested in the memory of complex events in young and older adults, the malleability of memory and the role of inhibitory processes in retrieval. I analyze the role of prior knowledge in the creation of false memories and the reconstructive nature of memory in everyday life. My last line of research focuses on prospective episodic memory by analyzing in young and old people our ability to think about the future. It is an ideal mental journey to analyze aging and to examine the positivity effect where it is appreciated that older people tend to view the future with optimism and to block or transform negative contents into more neutral or positive facts.

<strong>Keywords</strong>: False memories, witness memory in young and old, inhibitory processes (retrieval-induced forgetting), autobiographical memory, prospective memory, positivity.