The Cardenal Cisneros Higher Education Center has awarded the Psychology Prize to Alejandro Santos-Mayo for his doctoral thesis, developed at the Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (C3N) of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). This work represents a methodological and translational breakthrough in the study of the neural mechanisms involved in the processing of basic survival-oriented emotions.
The thesis, entitled “Inhibition and excitation of the human visual cortex during fear learning”, was defended in 2023 under the supervision of doctors Gianluca Susi and Stephan Moratti. In it, Santos-Mayo addresses fear conditioning through a rigorous dual approach: empirical and computational.
On the one hand, through magnetoencephalography (MEG), the study successfully identified an excitatory and inhibitory modulation in the right visual areas during the early gamma response (between 19 Hz and 71 Hz). On the other hand, the team designed computational models based on spiking neural networks to emulate the functional and electrophysiological profile of the primary visual cortex. The simulation demonstrated that the incorporation of cholinergic mechanisms successfully replicates the modulations of conditioned fear in visual activity.
These findings expand the classical characterization of the fear response, revealing not only the existence of an excitation mechanism for these signals, but also an inhibition mechanism that is key in safety learning. This provides new perspectives on emotion-driven attentional bias, with potential contributions to the therapeutic area.
This award highlights the importance of combining advanced techniques of electrophysiological biomarkers, such as MEG, with the computational modeling of the “Virtual Brain” that we promote at the C3N. Alejandro’s excellent work allows us to understand, at the level of biological circuitry, how our brain learns to differentiate danger from safety, opening up promising avenues for future clinical and therapeutic approaches.
From the Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory, we deeply congratulate Alejandro Santos-Mayo and appreciate the recognition from the Cardenal Cisneros Higher Education Center. This achievement reinforces the commitment of the UCM and our researchers to scientific excellence and knowledge transfer.
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