Juan Manuel Toro

Juan Manuel Toro is an ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and coordinates the Language and Comparative Cognition Group at the Center for Brain and Cognition. He earned a PhD in Psychology from the Universitat de Barcelona in 2005, demonstrating shared perceptual abilities between humans and animals during language acquisition.

His research focuses on the evolutionary origins of language and music cognition in humans versus non-human animals. Key findings include evidence that rats extract prosodic speech cues similarly to human infants and studies on biological bases for beat perception in music. His work has been recognized with an Ig Nobel Prize.

He teaches the Comparative Cognition course at the Master in Brain and Cognition program. Contact: juanmanuel.toro@upf.edu