Mapas cognitivos: Revisión crítica

Resumen

El artículo propone, desde una perspectiva cognitiva, una estructura conceptual para interpretar la amalgama de resultados obtenidos por la investigación sobre mapas cognitivos. Se describe y discute su carácter interdisciplinar, su semejanza con otros conceptos, los elementos de que consta, el tipo de información que contiene, así como sus imprecisiones e inconsistencias. Finalmente, se aportan argumentos acerca de la ventaja que supone partir de una concepción del mapa cognitivo como una estructura multirrepresentacional, dirigida a la acción, y se esbozan algunas sugerencias para la investigación futura.     

Processing of “unattended” threat-related information: Role of emotional content and context

Unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral visual scenes served as a context for the presentation of threat-related, positive, and neutral words. On each trial, 2 simultaneous prime words (one foveal, i.e., at fixation, and one parafoveal, i.e., 2.2° apart) appeared for 150 ms, followed by a foveally presented probe word in a lexical decision task. Results showed facilitation in response times for probe threat words when primed by an identical parafoveal word, in comparison with priming by an unrelated parafoveal word, and this effect was enhanced in an emotionally congruent unpleasant context. In contrast, no parafoveal effect appeared for positive words, even in a pleasant context. This reveals parallel processing of threat-related words outside the focus of attention.     

Ego-threat interpretive bias in test anxiety: On-line inferences

Abstract

The hypothesis that test anxiety is associated with an on-line bias towards threatening interpretations of ambiguous information was explored by means of a lexical decision task. Ambiguous sentences (concerned with ego-threat, physical-threat, or non-threat events) were presented to high- and low- test-anxiety subjects. Sentences were followed by a disambiguating word or a very wordlike corresponding nonword, which either confirmed or disconfirmed the threat implied by the sentence. A control condition involved the presentation of words and nonwords alone, without being primed by the sentences. Results indicated that there were no differences in lexical decision times as a function of test anxiety when words and nonwords were presented alone. In contrast, when they were primed, high-anxiety subjects took longer to respond correctly to the ego-threat confirming nonword, and to the ego-threat disconfirming word, compared with low-anxiety subjects; likewise, high-anxiety subjects responded faster to the ego-threat confirming word than to the ego-threat disconfirming word, compared with low-anxiety subjects. These results suggest that test anxious individuals are likely to draw inferences with an ego-threat meaning, but not with a physical-threat meaning, when reading ambiguous sentences.     

Primacy of emotional vs. semantic scene recognition in peripheral vision

Emotional scenes were presented peripherally (5.2° away from fixation) or foveally (at fixation) for 150 ms. In affective evaluation tasks viewers judged whether a scene was unpleasant or not, or whether it was pleasant or not. In semantic categorisation tasks viewers judged whether a scene involved animals or humans (superordinate-level task), or whether it portrayed females or males (subordinate-level task). The same stimuli were used for the affective and the semantic task. Results indicated that in peripheral vision affective evaluation was less accurate and slower than animal/human discrimination, and did not show any advantage over gender discrimination. In addition, performance impairment in the peripheral relative to the foveal condition was greater or equivalent for affective than for semantic categorisation. These findings cast doubts on the specialness and the primacy of affective over semantic recognition. The findings are also relevant when considering the role of the subcortical “low route” in emotional processing.     

Measuring Coping in Low-Income European American,African American,and Mexican American Adolescents: An Examination of Measurement Equivalence

We examined the cross-ethnic and cross-language equivalence of the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist (Ayers, T.S., Sandler, I.N., West, S.G. and Roosa, M.W. (1996). A dispositional and situational assessment of children's coping: Testing alternative models of coping. Journal of Personality , 64 (4), 923-958) by assessing item, functional, and scalar equivalence in a sample of 319 European American, African American, and Mexican American adolescents from low-income inner-city families. Depression, as measured by Children's Depression Inventory, was the criterion in the analyses of scalar equivalence. The results suggest considerable cross-ethnic and cross-language measurement equivalence of the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist. The findings also suggest some caution in using the Children's Depression Inventory in comparative studies of African American and Mexican American adolescents or in studies that treat these groups as homogeneous samples.     

A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets

Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper- and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.     

Psychological distance and reaction time in a Stroop task

Several sources of interference may simultaneously affect the onset of the well-known “Stroop effect.” Among them is the semantic component, which is reflected in the gradient or semantic effect. This effect consists of an increase in the amount of interference as the semantic distance between the word and the color concept decreases. Shepard (Science 237:1317–1323, 1987) relates psychological space, measured through multidimensional scaling, to mean response times. The present investigation aims to study the function relating the semantic gradient with the psychological distance between the word and the color in a Stroop task. After measuring the gradient, we obtained the subjective rating of the degree of dissimilarity of the gradient words with the concept of “color.” In our work, we show that the amount of interference in a Stroop task increases when the semantic distance from the word to the color concept decreases, and it does so exponentially. We replicated the study with different stimuli to test the robustness of the results.     

Purposes of reasoning and (a new vindication of) Moore’s proof of an external world

A common view about Moore’s Proof of an External World is that the argument fails because anyone who had doubts about its conclusion could not use the argument to rationally overcome those doubts. I agree that Moore’s Proof is—in that sense—dialectically ineffective at convincing an opponent or a doubter, but I defend that the argument (even when individuated taking into consideration the purpose of Moore’s arguing and, consequently, the preferred addressee of the Proof) does not fail. The key to my defence is to conceive the Proof as addressed to subjects with a different epistemic condition. To sustain this view I formulate some hypothesis about the common general purpose of arguing and I defend that it can be fulfilled even when the addressee of an argument is not someone who disbelieves or doubts its conclusion.     

On the value of genealogy,materiality, and networks: a response

In response to the challenges posed by Steven Engler, Martha Finch, Mark Gardiner, Laura Harrington, Paul Johnson, and Michael Stausberg, this essay fleshes out key terms in More than Belief (2011), including genealogy, materialism, non-reductionism, and networks, showing their value in researching and theorizing about religion.