Barbara Treccani

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Trento

Advances in technology have enabled museum curators to employ equipment that can measure visitors’ physiological responses, offering a means to monitor these responses, while, at the same time, potentially engaging visitors. However, it is unclear whether these devices genuinely promote a positive experience or, conversely, are perceived as intrusi...

This study investigated the impact of reading statements in a second language (L2) versus the first language (L1) on core knowledge confusion (CKC), superstition, and conspiracy beliefs. Previous research on the Foreign Language Effect (FLE) suggests that using an L2 elicits less intense emotional reactions, promotes rational decision-making, reduc...

Purpose and research questions: Despite the amount of existing work about bilingualism and some interesting studies about biculturalism, research somehow lacks interest in considering these two aspects as one big reality, bicultural bilingualism. The aim of this article is to bridge the gap between the linguistic and the cultural components that bu...

This article explores the phenomenon of “feeling different” experienced by bicultural bilingual individuals when they switch between their two different languages. Available data suggests that this experience is genuine and holds substantive value, not merely anecdotal. While on one hand, such a feeling may stem from the fact that the two languages...

Gamification has been increasingly used to foster motivation and engagement in adopting and maintaining a desired behavior. In recent years, the tailoring of gamification, based on the users' necessities, has gained a central role in research. To this end, we propose an End-User Development (EUD) solution that enables users who are not experts in p...

Manipulation of tangible objects helps children in both learning and development, while digital technology creates a motivating and engaging environment for children. Tangible interactive tools can effectively combine these two aspects. Nonetheless, to exploit their potential as educational devices, it is necessary to empower teachers in customizin...

The continuously increasing number of connected objects and sensors is opening up the possibility of introducing automations in many domains to better support people in their activities. However, such automations to be effective should be under the user control. Unfortunately, people often report difficulties in understanding the surrounding automa...

This paper presents a qualitative study that investigates the effects of some language choices in expressing the trigger part of a trigger-action rule on the users’ mental models. Specifically, we explored how 11 non-programmer participants articulated the definition of trigger-action rules in different contexts by choosing among alternative conjun...

The sense of lack of control has been shown to foster illusory pattern perception, superstition, conspiracy and religious beliefs. In two identical experiments we investigated whether the feeling of lacking control (vs. control) can also foster creative thinking, which we operationalized as the ability to produce associative and dissociative combin...

This paper describes two empirical research studies that investigated how to improve naïve users’ mental models to support end-user development (EUD) of Internet-of-Things (IoT). Specifically, we intended to evaluate the effectiveness of two different strategies, namely nudging and informing, to support trigger-action (TA) rule programming. To this...

Personality traits such as Need for Cognition, Locus of Control, Mindset and Self-efficacy could impact the perception, acceptance and appreciation of recommendations provided to support configuration tasks in the End User Development (EUD) context. In this paper we describe the user model services we have developed to measure such traits. These se...

In this paper, we describe a pilot study aimed to explore strategies used by non-programmer users to test trigger-action rules for customizing an IoT device. The main goal of our research was to examine strategies used by participants to detect and solve errors. In the pilot study, we asked non-programmers to imagine testing a set of rules, some of...

This paper presents a pilot study on end-user programming by therapists of a tangible tool for children on the autism spectrum. The core design ideas were to use detailed natural language descriptions of states and events, and an incremental process to facilitate the programming task. Our study provides initial evidence of the feasibility of this a...

Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive, or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism that allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli....

Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism which allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli, and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli...

Dementia is a global public health problem and its impact is bound to increase in the next decades, with a rapidly aging world population. Dementia is by no means an obligatory outcome of aging, although its incidence increases exponentially in old age, and its onset may be insidious. In the absence of unequivocal biomarkers, the accuracy of cognit...

In this paper, we present a preliminary study aimed at improving the users' mental model of an automatic smart home system based on trigger-action rules. We hypothesized that a computational model of how the rules are evaluated and activated, coupled with a linguistic form of the rules that clarifies the difference between events and states, may im...

The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for...

Performing a task with another person may either enhance or reduce the interference produced by task-irrelevant information. In three experiments, we employed the joint version of a Stroop-like task (i.e., the picture-word interference-PWI-task) to investigate some of the task features that seem to be critical in determining the effect of task-irre...

In three experiments we investigated the origin of the effects of the compatibility between the typical location of entities denoted by written words (e.g., “up” for eagle and “down” for carpet) and either the actual position of the words on the screen (e.g., upper vs. lower part of the screen), or the response position (e.g., upper- vs. lower- key...

Objective: The Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO) test is one of the most used tasks for the assessment of visuospatial perception. However, JLO items show a left-right structural asymmetry that interacts with the ipsilesional attentional biases of brain-damaged patients, that is, the main target population for which the test is intended, and unde...

Research on neuropsychology of consciousness owes very much to Anne Treisman’ Feature Integration Theory (FIT). FIT has stimulated studies in many different fields of cognitive neurosciences and played a fundamental role in increasing our understanding of the processes underlying conscious object perception. In this paper, I briefly outline how FIT...

Many cognitive tasks involve a response conflict between the response selected on the basis of the task-relevant attribute and that primed by an irrelevant attribute. Although response priming has been extensively investigated, we still have little evidence on whether it entails both excitatory and inhibitory processes and the way in which these pr...

Full- text available at: https://rdcu.be/6bSj The reversal logical recoding rule (i.e., "respond opposite") induced by an incompatible task (e.g., a task requiring to respond to red or green stimuli by pressing a key of the alternative colour compared to that of the stimulus) can be transferred to another task when the two tasks are combined in a t...

Cognitive control has been classically considered as a flexible process engaged to pursue intentional behaviors, as distinct from automatic processes, which are unintentional, inflexible, and triggered by unconscious mechanisms. Our study challenged this view, showing that such a distinction may not be so clear-cut. We analyzed motor-evoked potenti...

Lexical selection—both during reading aloud and speech production—involves selecting an intended word, while ignoring irrelevant lexical activation. This process has been studied by the use of interference tasks. Examples are the Stroop task, where participants ignore the written color word and name the color of the ink, picture–word interference t...

Since the publication of the seminal work by Bialystok et al. (2004), the argument of bilingualism enhancing executive functioning (EF) has attracted the attention of both expert and nonexpert audiences. However, the picture of general agreement on this subject has been recently undermined. The paper by Paap et al. (2015) calls into question many d...

Roelofs, Piai, and Schriefers (Language and Cognitive Processes) test both the WEAVER++ model of word production and the response-exclusion account of performance in Stroop-like tasks against data from the word-word interference (WWI) task, and conclude that whereas the WEAVER++ successfully accounts for those data, the response-exclusion hypothesi...

The present study aimed to assess whether the representation of the typical size of objects can interact with response position codes in two-choice bimanual tasks, and give rise to a SNARC-like effect (faster responses when the representation of the typical size of the object to which the target stimulus refers corresponds to response side). Partic...

It is a widely held belief that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in executive-control tasks, but is this what all studies actually demonstrate? The idea of a bilingual advantage may result from a publication bias favoring studies with positive results over studies with null or negative effects. To test this hypothesis, we looked at co...

In the present work we were concerned with the role of sound representations in object recognition. In order to address this issue we made use of a picture naming task in which target pictures might be accompanied by a white-noise burst. White-noise was thought to interfere with the representation of the sound possibly associated with the depicted...

Previous studies have shown that number processing can induce spatial biases in perception and action and can trigger the orienting of visuospatial attention. Few studies, however, have investigated how spatial processing and visuospatial attention influences number processing. In the present study, we used the optokinetic stimulation (OKS) techniq...

This study aimed at assessing whether the mere belief of performing a task with another person, who is in charge of the complementary part of the task, is sufficient for the so-called joint Simon effect to occur. In all three experiments of the study, participants sat alone in a room and underwent two consecutive Go/NoGo tasks that were identical e...

Il Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test – Third Edition (RBMT-3) è un test complementare ai test di memoria tradizionali, capace di predire i deficit di memoria in situazioni ecologiche, cioè nella vita reale (validità ecologica). È stato sviluppato per valutare le abilità di memoria in adulti con e senza cerebrolesioni, e per monitorare i cambiamenti...

Previous studies have shown that number processing involves mechanisms related to visuo-spatial attention orienting. The majority of these studies has revealed the effects of number processing on visuo-spatial attention orienting and on spatially-encoded responses (e.g., left-sided, right-sided). Fewer studies, however, have investi- gated how the...

Converging evidence suggests that visuospatial attention plays a pivotal role in numerical processing, especially when the task involves the manipulation of numerical magnitudes. Visuospatial neglect impairs contralesional attentional orienting not only in perceptual but also in numerical space. Indeed, patients with left neglect show a bias toward...

Prevalent theories about consciousness propose a causal relation between lack of spatial coding and absence of conscious experience: The failure to code the position of an object is assumed to prevent this object from entering consciousness. This is consistent with influential theories of unilateral neglect following brain damage, according to whic...

The aim of the present study was three-fold. First, we wanted to provide converging evidence for the interaction between motor/spatial codes activated upon word recognition and the planning of responses: stimuli were presented centrally whereas the responses where given by pressing one of two vertically arranged buttons. Second, we aimed at evaluat...

The Judgment of Line Orientation Test (JLOT) is considered a valid task for the assessment of visuospatial perception, and, for this reason, it is also considered to be a sensitive tool able to discriminate between right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients and left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) patients. In contrast with this view, we report evidence that...

In 4 experiments, we intermixed trials in which the stimulus color was relevant with trials where participants had to judge the stimulus shape or parity and found that the logical-recoding rule (Hedge & Marsh, 1975) applied to the relevant dimension in a task can generalize to the irrelevant dimension of the other task. The mapping assigned to part...

Balanced bilinguals have been shown to have an enhanced ability to inhibit distracting information. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that the bilinguals' efficiency in inhibitory control can be advantageous in some conditions, but disadvantageous in others-for example, negative priming conditions, in which previously irrelevant informa...

The present study aimed at investigating the processing stage underlying stimulus-stimulus (S-S) congruency effects by examining the relation of a particular type of congruency effect (i.e., the flanker effect) with a stimulus-response (S-R) spatial correspondence effect (i.e., the Simon effect). Experiment 1 used a unilateral flanker task in which...

In this study, we investigated whether the processing of written words leads to a preferential coding of word beginnings and whether this coding occurs in the context of word representations that are spatial in nature and depend on the orientation of the actual stimuli. Two experiments were carried out wherein participants were asked to press a lef...

The spatial Simon effect is often asymmetric, being greater on one side than on the other. To date, not much attention has been paid to these asymmetries, and explanations of the Simon effect do not take them into account. In the present article, we attempt to clarify the statistical implications of the asymmetries so as to provide a useful tool fo...

The authors investigated whether a Simon effect could be observed in an accessory-stimulus Simon task when participants were unaware of the task-irrelevant accessory cue. In Experiment 1A a central visual target was accompanied by a suprathreshold visual lateral cue. A regular Simon effect (i.e., faster cue-response corresponding reaction times [RT...

Full text available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393204001836 The judgement of line orientation test (JLOT) is widely used to assess visuo-spatial processing. Most neuropsychological studies have shown that on this task right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients are significantly more impaired than left hemisphere damage...