Cognitive Sciences and Education in Non-WEIRD Populations

Marcus Vinicius Alves  holds a PhD in psychobiology from Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Brazil) and has experience as a visiting researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada) and as a research and development specialist at Université du Luxembourg (Luxembourg). At present, he is a full professor at Faculty of Technology and Sciences in Salvador, Brazil, and also the lead researcher of the Sociocognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory (LINES), registered at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ). Alves’ research interests include learning, memory, incidental and motivated forgetting, mental effort (processing systems, attention, and cognitive load theory), and social cognition, using mostly eye tracking and pupillometry.

Roberta Ekuni is an Adjunct Professor at Universidade Estadual do Norte do Paraná - Graduate Program in Education. She has a PhD at Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Brazil), and she was a visitor student at Washington University in St. Louis. Also, she is one of the editors of “Neuromyth’s Busters” book collection. She has interest in research that applies cognitive psychology to education, especially involving retrieval practice to improve student’s memory.

Maria Julia Hermida is an Adjunct Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham and researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research, in Argentina. She has received a PhD in Psychology from the Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina. For more than ten years she has been studying child cognitive development, how it is affected by poverty and which interventions can help to prevent the negative cognitive consequences of poverty. Specifically, she has conducted different interventions combining cognitive neuroscience and educational approaches in diverse scholar contexts.

Juan Valle Lisboa is an Aggregate Professor of Biophysics and Neuroscience at Universidad de la República (UDELAR), sharing his time between the Schools of Science and Psychology. He is a member of the Program for the Development of Basic Science PEDECIBA Council (www.pedeciba.edu.uy). He has received a PhD in Biology and a Master in Biophysics from the PEDECIBA-UDELAR program.  His main research interests are the study of learning and cognition, and the application of digital technologies to enhance Education. In particular in the last few years he has directed projects aimed at measuring math and reading abilities as well as neuropsychological predictors of reading with the use of digital devices like tablets and cell phones. He is also interested in basic aspects of language processing, lexical representation and linguistic composition, and the use of neural network models to describe these processes.