About me
I am postdoctoral researcher in basic psychology and cognitive neuroscience, currently working as an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology of Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC).
After I graduated in Psychology at my alma mater Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) in 2014, I completed a MSc in Research in Behaviour and Cognition at Universitat de Barcelona, where I obtained my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells and Dr. Joaquín Morís. During my PhD, I also did an internship at the Donders Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Cognition under the mentoring of Dr. Vitoria Piai. Later, I pursued a joint postdoc between the Biological Psychology Lab at Otto-von-Guericke-Universität-Magdeburg and the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit at Universitat de Barcelona under the guidance of Dr. Tömme Noesselt, a position that was funded by the Spanish program Margarita Salas.
My research focus is on brain mechanisms involved in language comprehension and language learning, both in cognitively healthy and in clinical populations. Specifically, I employ neuroimaging techniques (mainly EEG and fMRI) to study anticipatory processes that facilitate sentence comprehension and boost the acquisition of new words and new concepts.
In addition to this main line of research, I am also interested in:
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translational research (in almost any cog neuro topic)
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neurodegenerative diseases
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mental health
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individual differences in moral decision-making
I am passionate about teaching and communicating; transferring knowledge (and thinking of innovative ways to do so) is one of the most fulfilling activities that I know of. My free time is filled with family, friends, music, and nature (especially birds!).
Publications
2022
León-Cabrera, P., Guillamon, A., Vega, D. C., & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2022). The beauty of language structure: a single-case fMRI study of palindrome creation. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 63, 101086. URL | Preprint
León-Cabrera, P., Piai, V., Morís, J., & Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2022) Alpha power decreases associated with prediction in written and spoken sentence comprehension. Neuropsychologia. In press. Open Access
2021
León-Cabrera, P., Pagonabarraga, J., Morís, J., Martínez-Horta, S., Marín-Lahoz, J., Horta-Barba, A., Bejr-Kasem, H., Kulisevsky, J., & Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2021). Neural signatures of predictive language processing in Parkinson’s disease with and without mild cognitive impairment. Cortex. 141, 112-127. Open Access
Rodriguez-Fornells, A., León-Cabrera, P., Gabarros, A., & Sierpowska, J. (2021). Inner Speech Brain Mapping. Is It Possible to Map What We Cannot Observe?. In Intraoperative Mapping of Cognitive Networks (pp. 381-409). Springer, Cham.
2020
Sierpowska, J., León-Cabrera, P., Camins, A., Juncadella, M., Gabarrós, A., & Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2020). The black box of global aphasia: Neuroanatomical underpinnings of remission from acute global aphasia with preserved inner language function. Cortex, 130, 340-350. Open Access
2019
León-Cabrera, P., Flores, A., Rodríguez-Fornells, A., & Morís, J. (2019). Ahead of time: early sentence slow cortical modulations associated to semantic prediction. NeuroImage, 189, 192-201. URL
2018
Gurtubay-Antolin, A., León-Cabrera, P., & Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2018). Neural Evidence of Hierarchical Cognitive Control during Haptic Processing: An fMRI Study. Eneuro, 5(6). Open Access.
2017
León-Cabrera, P., Rodríguez-Fornells, A., & Morís, J. (2017). Electrophysiological correlates of semantic anticipation during speech comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 99, 326-334. URL
Under review
Currently no papers under review
Contact me
Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit
C/Feixa Llarga, S/N
08907 L'Hospitalet de Llobregat
Barcelona (Spain)