Press notes: BCBL consolidates its scientific structure with new specialized areas

• Ikerbasque researchers Manuela Ruzzoli and Brendan Costello will lead new groups to study key factors in human behavior and sign languages.

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), located in San Sebastian, has reinforced its internal research structure and has developed new specialized areas. These changes aim to further advance scientific knowledge in the field of cognitive neuroscience of language.

Ikerbasque researcher Manuela Ruzzoli, who has been working at BCBL since 2021, will lead the new research group “Attention, Cognitive Control, and Affect.” This team will focus on understanding the interaction of these three key components of cognition through a multimodal approach that will combine neuroimaging and brain-body rhythms, together with psychophysical and neuropsychological tests.

The main aim of the group, which currently consists of four members, will be to identify brain states that enable designing strategies to favor cognitive self-regulation.

“We are pursuing a line of research that links basic science on the mechanisms of attention, cognitive control, and emotions with decision-making and adaptation to changing environments,” explains Manuela Ruzzoli.

Focus on sign language

At the same time, the BCBL team devoted to studying sign language, led by Ikerbasque researcher Brendan Costello, is consolidating its position within the center and becoming an independent group to further analyze how these languages are structured and represented mentally.

“Sign languages, such as Spanish Sign Language (LSE in Spanish), offer a unique opportunity to understand how language works in a modality other than speech. Our work contributes to describing the cognitive reality of sign language use (in deaf and hearing signers) but also to broadening our general understanding of language,” explains Brendan Costello.

To this end, the nine-person team combines behavioral tasks and advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, and eye-tracking, to study how and where the brain processes sign language and whether this processing differs from that of written or spoken words.

The restructuring of BCBL's research framework concludes with adjustments in the coordination of two other groups. On the one hand, the “Neurobiology of Language” group, previously led by Manuel Carreiras, will now be led by Ikerbasque Associate Professor Lucia Amoruso, consolidating its core research lines while fostering new directions at the intersection of language, healthy aging, and neurodegeneration.

On the other hand, Ikerbasque researcher Efthymia (Effie) Kapnoula will take over as head of the “Spoken Language” group after many years of outstanding leadership by Prof. Arthur Samuel. Kapnoula will carry forward the group’s international prestige by strengthening its foundational research lines and expanding into novel directions focused on real-time speech processing and language change across the lifespan.

Thus, BCBL will continue to strengthen its commitment to excellence in research on cognition, the brain, and language, while consolidating emerging scientific areas and opening new opportunities for collaboration and knowledge transfer to society.