Much of his work has focused on the study of the evolution of the human mind and the human brain. He has contributed to this field with several essays on the role of the working memoy in the creation of the modern human mind, on the relationships between the brain’s shape and cognition as well as interactions between emotions and cognitive processes in order to study our mind and brain’s vulnerability to external factors, particularly social factors. In recent years, he has studied links between language and emotions, and notably, how emotions affect syntactic and semantic comprehension.
He is co-author of more than 100 scientific articles, 90 presentations at congresses, various courses and conferences, and author of books such as ¿Qué es la actividad cerebral? Técnicas para su estudio (Biblioteca Nueva, 2001), La mente del Homo sapiens. El cerebro y la evolución humana (Aguilar, 2008), La evolución del cerebro: la fascinante historia de nuestra mente (RBA, 2018) and El cerebro social: por qué estamos diseñados para conectar con los demás (RBA, 2019).

Her career in this field is deeply marked by the stable cooperation with researchers of national and international standing and by an interdisciplinary approach. She has focused on visual word recognition and syntactic processing by conducting comprehension, production and memory studies in both monoglots and bilinguals. She is the author and co-author of some 60 publications and more than 90 presentations in national and international conferences. Her most recent research focuses on analyzing the possible effects of lexical-semantic variables, such as animacy or emotionality, on syntactic and morphosyntactic processing – with special attention to grammatical gender – through behavioural measures and the recording of brain activity. She has also cooperated in the development of emotional word bases that collect subjective estimates of affective valence and emotional activation in Spanish, including the digital tool emoFinder (Fraga, Guasch, Haro, Padrón & Ferré, 2018).

He is a member of the International Thematic Network  Steering Committee “Translation, Research, Empiricism, Cognition” (TREC). He directs an Inter-American Development Bank intervention programme aimed at fostering cognitive and linguistic stimulation in children from vulnerable families. He currently coordinates research projects in more than 10 countries. As a teacher, he has taught courses in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the United States, Germany and China. His more than 150 publications — including books, book chapters and articles in renowned international scientific journals — deal mainly with neurolinguistics and bilingualism. He has made more than 100 presentations at international academic events and he has participated in many scientific dissemination activities, as his column “Mente y Comunicación” (Mind and Communication) on Radio Mitre Mar de Plata. His work has been awarded by several institutions such as the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, the Ibero-American Society of Neuroeducation, the Argentine Association of Behavioural Sciences and the Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.

She has conducted interdisciplinary research on the meaning of emotional terms in different languages and cultures, on conceptual metaphors, and on the role of emotions in the conceptualisation of other domains (such as colour and time). She is also interested in experimental research on conceptual metaphor. She is the executive director of the international GRID project, and is involved in other studies on the representation of emotions, especially anger. She is co-editor of the volume Components of Emotional Meaning: A Sourcebook (OUP, 2013) about the GRID project, and has published in journals of different disciplinary profile, such as Metaphor and Symbol, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Cognition and Emotion, Swiss Journal of Psychology or Social Science Information…

He has been part of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psycholinguistics at the University de La Laguna since 2012. He started as a Juan de la Cierva Researcher and since 2017, within the Ramón y Cajal programme, he has been working as a researcher at the University of La Laguna.