Metaphors for vaccination and defeasible reasoning

The project considers metaphor as a reasoning and a communicative device in health communication, to let people understand an abstract concept, vaccination, in terms of a concrete one, the beehive. The use of metaphors in vaccine communication might be crucial to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon. We conducted a study to investigate whether and when a novel metaphor (“the beehive”), extended via the relevant property for vaccination (“cooperative”), can be an effective reasoning and communicative device. We proposed to participants three scenarios, described in both literal vs. metaphorical terms, comparing a safe scenario vs. a “free rider” scenario (undercutting defeater) and a “non-vaccinated community” scenario (rebutting defeater). Indeed, different premises in defeasible reasoning about vaccination could show that uncertain situations, depending on the proportion of unvaccinated people, could make a relevant difference for the conclusion on the need for being cooperative in vaccination. We hypothesized that metaphors could improve the communicative effects of pro-vaccination texts, especially in uncertain reasoning scenarios, in terms of persuasion, emotional impact, trust in experts/institutions, and vaccination intentions

An Experimental Study on Sarcasm Comprehension in School Children: The Possible Role of Contextual, Linguistics and Meta-Representative Factors

Understanding sarcasm is a complex ability, which includes several processes. Previous studies demonstrated the possible roles of linguistic and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children, while the influence of specific contextual variables still needs to be investigated. Here, we present two studies investigating the possible role of contextual, linguistics, and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children. In Study 1, we investigated sarcasm comprehension in 8–9-year-old school children in three different contexts, in which both familiarity and authority were manipulated. We found that understanding sarcasm was facilitated when the conversational partner was characterized by a high level of authority and familiarity (the mother) rather than when the conversational partner was an adult with a lower level of both authority and familiarity (the cashier of a food store). In Study 2, we replicated and extended Study 1 by investigating the possible influence of the same contextual factors but in a more sizeable sample and at different ages: first, third, and fifth grades of primary school. We found that understanding sarcasm improved significantly with age. The results of both studies indicated that understanding sarcasm is influenced by contextual factors. Children at any age better understood sarcasm produced by a speaker with a high level of both familiarity and authority. This ability improved with age. These results expand our understanding of how children infer a speaker’s intentions in sarcasm. This might be particularly of interest to develop possible interventions for children on the Autism Spectrum, who are known to misunderstand sarcasm at different levels of complexity

Affective variables and cognitive performances during exercise in a group of adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus

Previous research has documented that type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is associated with cognitive impairment. Psychological variables were repeatedly investigated to understand why T2DM patients are poorly active, despite standards of medical care recommends performing aerobic and resistance exercise regularly and reducing the amount of time spent sitting. This exploratory study aims to investigate how affective variables as thoughts, feelings, and individuals’ stage of exercise adoption can modulate low cognitive performances during an experimental procedure based on exercise. The Exercise Thoughts Questionnaire (ETQ), Exercise-Induced Feeling Scale (EFI), and Physical Activity Stage of Change were administered to a sample of 12 T2DM patients. The Bivalent Shape Task (BST) alone (BST), BST with exercise [control exercise recovery (CER) + BST], and BST with metaboreflex [post-exercise muscle ischemia (PEMI) + BST] were used as mental task, and response time to congruent, incongruent, and neutral stimuli was recorded. Concomitant cerebral oxygenation (COX) was evaluated by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). As expected, T2DM patients performed significantly better when the stimulus was presented in congruent trials (followed by neutral and incongruent). In the CER + BST session, T2DM patients showed longer reaction time to incongruent trials than in the PEMI + BST and BST alone sessions. Positive feelings toward exercise seem to modulate cognitive performances in high challenging task only if T2DM patients were conscious to play exercise. These results could provide some insights for health intervention targeting exercise for patients with T2DM in order to enhance cognitive performances

The Morra game as a naturalistic test bed for investigating automatic and voluntary processes in random sequence generation

Morra is a 3,000-years-old hand game of prediction and numbers. The two players reveal their hand simultaneously, presenting a number of fingers between 1 and 5, while calling out a number between 2 and 10. Any player who successfully guesses the summation of fingers revealed by both players scores a point. While the game is extremely fast-paced, making it very difficult for players to achieve a conscious control of their game strategies, expert players regularly outperform non-experts, possibly with strategies residing out of conscious control. In this study, we used Morra as a naturalistic setting to investigate the necessity of attentive control in generation of sequence of items and the ability to proceduralize random number generation, which are both a crucial defensive strategy in Morra and a well-known empirical procedure to test the central executive capacity within the working memory model. We recorded the sequence of numbers generated by expert players in a Morra tournament in Sardinia (Italy) and by undergraduate students enrolled in a course-based research experience (CRE) course at Lawrence Technological University in the United States. Number sequences generated by non-expert and expert players both while playing Morra and in a random number generation task (RNGT) were compared in terms of randomness scores. Results indicate that expert players of Morra largely outperformed non-experts in the randomness scores only within Morra games, whereas in RNGT the two groups were very similar. Importantly, survey data acquired after the games indicate that expert players have very poor conscious recall of their number generation strategies used during the Morra game. Our results indicate that the ability of generating random sequences can be proceduralized and do not necessarily require attentive control. Results are discussed in the framework of the dual processing theory and its automatic-parallel-fast vs.controlled-sequential-slow polarities

Exploring Metaphor’s Communicative Effects in Reasoning on Vaccination

Introduction: The paper investigates the impact of the use of metaphors in reasoning tasks concerning vaccination, especially for defeasible reasoning cases. We assumed that both metaphor and defeasible reasoning can be relevant to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon, by anticipating possible defeating conditions. Methods: We hypothesized that extended metaphor could improve both the argumentative and the communicative effects of the message. We designed an empirical study to test our main hypotheses: participants (N = 196, 78% females; Meanage = 27.97 years, SDage = 10.40) were presented with a text about vaccination, described in either literal or metaphorical terms, based on uncertain vs. safe reasoning scenarios. Results: The results of the study confirmed that defeasible reasoning is relevant for the communicative impact of a text and that an extended metaphor enhances the overall communicative effects of the message, in terms of understandability, persuasion, perceived safety, and feeling of control over the health situation, collective trust in expertise and uptake of experts' advice. However, the results show that this effect is significantly nuanced by the type of defeasible reasoning, especially in the case of participants' trust in expertise and commitment to experts' advice. Conclusion: Both communicative and defeasible reasoning competences are needed to enhance trust in immunization, with possible different outcomes at an individual and collective level

Natural language learning and grounding for robotic systems

In many ways, human cognition is importantly predictive. We predict the sensory consequences of our own actions, but we also predict, and react to, the sensory consequences of how others experience their own actions. This ability extends to perceiving the intentions of other humans based on past and current actions. We present research results that show that social aspects and future movement patterns can be predicted from fairly simple kinematic patterns in biological motion sequences. The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate and discuss the different environmental (gravity and perspective) and bodily constraints on understanding our social and movement-based interactions with others. In a series of experiments, we have used psychophysical methods and recordings from interactions with objects in natural settings. This includes experiments on the incidental processing of biological motion as well as driving simulator studies that examine the role of kinematic patterns of cyclists and driver’s accuracy to predict the cyclist’s intentions in traffic.  The results we present show both clear effects of “low-level” biological motion factors, such as opponent motion, on the incidental triggering of attention in basic perceptual tasks and “higher-lever” top-down guided perception in the intention prediction of cyclist behavior. We propose to use our results to stimulate discussion about the interplay between expectation mediated and stimulus driven effects of visual processing in spatial cognition the context of human interaction. Such discussion will include the role of context in gesture recognition and to what extent our visual system can handle visually complex environments

TPL - TEST DI PRIMA LETTURA PER BAMBINI DI PRIMA E SECONDA CLASSE DI SCUOLA PRIMARIA

I test comunemente utilizzati per valutare le abilità di lettura si basano su dati quantitativi, relativi al numero di errori commessi e al tempo impiegato. Questi sono indici importantissimi, ma non considerano l’aspetto qualitativo del processo con cui i bambini riconoscono le parole che leggono. La peculiarità e la novità del TPL stanno proprio nel fornire strumenti per analizzare qualitativamente lo sviluppo del processo di lettura, da una fase incentrata su una decifrazione frammentata della stringa ortografica fino a una pronuncia fluida e immediata della parola. Il TPL valuta lo sviluppo della lettura in bambini delle prime due classi di scuola primaria e si è rivelato utile per evidenziare diversi pattern di disturbo della lettura nei bambini dislessici