Self-regulated profiles and academic achievement

To date, research on the relation between learning self-regulation and academic achievement has generally show disparate results. This work intends to look into this relation from a new perspective, which consists in classifying the students as more or less self-regulated depending on diverse indicators and using cluster analysis. The aim of this work was to identify the possible self-regulated learning profiles in a sample of university students. By means of stepwise linear regression analysis, we determined which of the selected variables better predicted metacognitive self-regulation. Then, three significantly different self-regulated learning profiles were obtained by two-step cluster analysis with those variables. Lastly, ANOVA was used to analyse the relation between the self-regulated learning profiles and academic achievement. The implications of these data for the educational practice at university are discussed.     

The distortion of spatial relationships between local elements in hierarchical patterns decreases the global advantage effect

The present study examined the influence of perceptual organization on the processing of global and local information in hierarchical patterns. In two experiments, we examined whether disturbing the spatial relationships between local elements by introducing between-element distance and size heterogeneity affected global processing dominance. The effects on global processing dominance of undistorted compound stimuli with equidistant and homogeneous local elements were compared with those of compound stimuli which presented between-element distance heterogeneity (Experiment 1) or heterogeneity in size (Experiment 2). The results showed that the global advantage effect decreased similarly under conditions of between-element distance and size heterogeneity that disturbed the spatial relationships between local elements. The results provide new evidence on the role of perceptual organization in hierarchical patterns processing.     

Affective priming of emotional pictures in parafoveal vision: Left visual field advantage

This study investigated whether stimulus affective content can be extracted from visual scenes when these appear in parafoveal locations of the visual field and are foveally masked, and whether there is lateralization involved. Parafoveal prime pleasant or unpleasant scenes were presented for 150 msec 2.5° away from fixation and were followed by a foveal probe scene that was either congruent or incongruent in emotional valence with the prime. Participants responded whether the probe was emotionally positive or negative. Affective priming was demonstrated by shorter response latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs. This effect occurred when the prime was presented in the left visual field at a 300-msec prime-probe stimulus onset asynchrony, even when the prime and the probe were different in physical appearance and semantic category. This result reveals that the affective significance of emotional stimuli can be assessed early through covert attention mechanisms, in the absence of overt eye fixations on the stimuli, and suggests that right-hemisphere dominance is involved.     

Body,Mind and Bonds

In this paper, after reviewing some of the controversial concepts of psychosomatics, and their historical development as well as some of their theoretical and clinical consequences, I propose a vincular point of view of this type of pathology, with some dreams of a psychosomatic patient where different aspects of the proposed model can be observed.     

Evaluating the efficacy of a program to enhance college students' self-regulation learning processes and learning strategies

The present study examines the efficacy of a program designed to enhance college students'learning processes and study strategies. The program was organised around a number of letters written by a freshman, Gervásio (Rosário, Nú?ez, & González-Pienda, 2006), telling about his new experiences, troubles, and successes in the university. This intervention program is intended to promote a series of strategies (cognitive, meta-cognitive, and supportive) which allow students to manage their learning processes in a more proficient, successful, and autonomous way. The collected data suggest that students who had the opportunity to follow the program significantly improved their declarative knowledge about learning strategies, reduced their use of surface approaches to study, and extended the newly acquired skills to new and different tasks and assignments.     

Common region wins the competition between extrinsic grouping cues: Evidence from a task without explicit attention to grouping

The competition between perceptual grouping factors is a relatively ignored topic, especially in the case of extrinsic grouping cues (e.g., common region or connectedness). Recent studies have examined the integration of extrinsic cues using tasks that induce selective attention to groups based on different grouping cues. However, this procedure could generate alternative strategies for task performance, which are non-related to the perceptual grouping operations. In the current work, we used an indirect task, i.e. repetition discrimination task, without explicit attention to grouping cues to further examine the rules that govern dominance between competing extrinsic grouping factors. This procedure allowed us to obtain an unbiased measure of the competition between common region and connectedness cues acting within the same display. The results corroborate previous data showing that grouping by common region dominated the perceived organization of the display, even though the phenomenological strength of the grouping cues was equated for each participant by means of a preliminary scaling task. Our results highlight the relevance of using indirect tasks as an essential tool for the systematic study of the integration of extrinsic grouping cues.     

Can small lesions induce language reorganization as large lesions do?

Shift of the cortical mechanisms of language from the usually dominant left to the non-dominant right hemisphere has been demonstrated in the presence of large brain lesions. Here, we report a similar phenomenon in a patient with a cavernoma over the anterolateral superior temporal gyrus associated with epilepsy. Language mapping was performed by two complementary procedures, magnetoencephalography, and electrocorticography. The maps, indicated right temporal lobe dominance for receptive language and left frontal lobe dominance for expressive language. These results indicate that a small lesion, associated with epilepsy, may produce selective shifting of receptive language mechanisms as large lesions have been known to produce.