Tania Fernandes PhD

Tania Patricia Gregorio Fernandes is an Assistant Professor at Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, and the coordinator of the Research Group Cognition in Context (CO2) of the Research Center for Psychological Science (CICPSI), Faculdade de Psicologia, ULisboa.

She has been working in the field of Cognitive Psychology at the interface of Cognitive Neurosciences and Neuropsychology. Her major scientific interest is to understand how cultural experiences can modulate the cognitive system in such powerful and specific ways. Her scientific work has been conducted in two lines of research: in the Speech Perception field, and on visual word recognition and the impact of literacy (learning to read and write) in independent cognitive systems (visual and language processes).

For the study of Speech Perception, she has often used the Artificial Language Learning paradigm, besides other, conventional paradigms, to study speech perception under adverse listening conditions. She is also interested in understanding the dynamics of lexical competition and the integration of new lexical items in the mental lexicon of adults, including the moderator impact of aging (both pathological and typical) and of the hippocampus on this lexicalization process.

Since her post-doctoral work at Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2008, she has also been studying the impact of literacy acquisition on spoken word recognition and on visual processing (i.e., in the visual object recognition system) and the visual word recognition system. Given her interest in reading and visual processes in typical and atypical development, including in adult people differing in schooling and literacy, she has also been studying the associated causes and consequences of poor reading in developmental dyslexia, on which she adopted a neuropsychological perspective. In this line of research recently she has been using neuroimaging techniques (EEG-ERPs and fMRI) and eye movement recordings.