MARIA FERNANDEZ LOPEZ

María Fernández López is an Assistant Professor (Ajudant Doctor/A) at Universitat de València's Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy, affiliated with the Department of Basic Psychology and the ERI Reading Research institute. Her research focuses on cognitive neuroscience of reading, particularly orthographic processing and visual word recognition mechanisms.

She completed her PhD in 2022 at Universitat de València with the thesis "How literacy shapes orthographic processing", supervised by Dr. Manuel Perea Lara, Dr. Marta Vergara Martínez, and Dr. Ana Marcet.

Research Interests: Dr. López investigates how the brain processes written language using experimental methods like masked priming, lexical decision tasks, and ERP measurements. Key themes include:

• Resilience of reading systems to distortions (rotated/replaced letters, accents, case-mixing)
• Neural mechanisms of word recognition and priming effects
• Impact of literacy on orthographic processing
• Visual similarity and positional coding in lexical access

Her recent publications (2020-2025) predominantly explore:

• Sandwich priming dynamics and temporal processing windows
• ERP correlates of letter degradation and rotation tolerance
• Top-down feedback in visual word recognition
• Specialized processing of logotypes and city names

She leads/co-leads the READit Cognitive Neuroscience and Reading research group, focusing on experimental psycholinguistics and neurocognitive approaches to reading.