Ian Craig Simpson

• Post-doctoral resercher at University of Granada

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 hu...

It is possible that statistical learning (SL) plays a role in almost every mental activity. Indeed, research on SL has grown rapidly over recent decades in an effort to better understand perception and cognition. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of how SL operates, in particular with regard to its (im)mutability. Here, we investigated wh...

There is little empirical evidence showing a direct link between a capacity for statistical learning (SL) and proficiency with natural language. Moreover, discussion of the role of SL in language acquisition has seldom focused on literacy development. Our study addressed these issues by investigating the relationship between SL and reading ability...

Previous studies implicate suprasegmental phonology in reading acquisition. However, little is known about how suprasegmental sensitivity develops or how it contributes to reading. Here, 130 Spanish primary-school children participated in this 2-year longitudinal study. Nonlinguistic rhythm, lexical-stress sensitivity and metrical-stress sensitivit...

The aim of this systematic review is to identify cognitive interventional studies which have used randomized controlled trials (RCT) and whose purpose was to improve the cognitive development of vulnerable children and adolescents (< 18 years old). We conducted a systematic literature search in the following databases: Web of Science (core collecti...

Introduction Research shows how conditions in socio-economically disadvantaged environments can be a risk factor for children’s cognitive development. Consequently, children with neurodevelopmental disorders growing up in such environments face a double challenge. This study analyzed the effect of a comprehensive cognitive stimulation program on 4...

Languages can express grammatical gender through different ortho-phonological regularities present in nouns (e.g., the cues “-o” and “-a” for the masculine and the feminine respectively in Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish). The term “gender transparency” was coined to describe these regularities (Bates et al., 1995). In gendered languages, we can he...

Background: Guatemala remains one of the poorest countries in Central America and suffers from high rates of social inequality and violence. In addition to the negative impact that two years without attending school has had on Guatemalan children due to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, this unfavourable socioeconomic context poses a risk...

Autores: Equipo de investigación (Fundación ETEA- Instituto de Desarrollo de la Universidad Loyola Andalucía; Departamento de Psicología y Departamento de Educación de la Universidad Loyola Andalucía): Joaquín A. Ibáñez Alfonso, Pablo Rodríguez Prieto, Ian Simpson Diego Gómez Baya, Desireé Ruiz Aranda, Rosalba Company Córdoba, Claudia García de la...

Background Guatemala remains one of the poorest countries in the American continent and suffers from high rates of social inequality and violence. Among other potential disadvantages, this unfavourable socioeconomic context poses a risk to children’s emotional and cognitive development (1, 2). In addition to the negative impact that two years witho...

Background: Guatemala remains one of the poorest countries in central America and suffers from high rates of social inequality and violence. Among other disadvantages, this unfavourable socioeconomic context poses a risk to children’s emotional and cognitive development. In addition to the negative impact that two years without attending school has...

Few studies exist on the reading habits of the deaf population and those that do were largely published more than 20 years ago. Hence, changes in reading habits due to the availability of online reading material and portable electronic devices in the deaf population have likely evolved. Additionally, in the hearing population, confinement caused ch...

Diet directly affects children’s physical and mental development. Nonetheless, how food insecurity and household food consumption impact the cognitive performance of children at risk of social exclusion remains poorly understood. In this regard, children in Guatemala face various hazards, mainly related to the socioeconomic difficulties that thousa...

The Guatemalan pediatric population is affected by a high incidence of poverty and violence. The previous literature showed that these experiences may ultimately impact cognitive performance. The aim of this article is to update the standardized scores for ten neuropsychological tests commonly used in Guatemala considering vulnerability. A total of...

Background Many studies have evaluated the effects that a lack of resources has in children’s physical and cognitive development. Although there are reviews that have focused on applied interventions from different perspectives, there is still a need for a comprehensive review of what has been attempted with these children from the cognitive interv...

Background Reading comprehension is a complex process influenced by many factors. However, the abilities that are known to influence reading comprehension may not contribute equally for children with different levels of oral language. Aims Here we examined the relationship of two factors known to influence reading comprehension (morphology and syn...

The aim of this study was to update ten neuropsychological tests recently standardized in the Guatemala population by adding more participants to the sample used to create the standards, and considering the vulnerability as a factor. To demonstrate the importance of including vulnerability as a factor, we evaluated a vulnerable group using 10 instr...

Low-socioeconomic backgrounds represent a risk factor for children’s cognitive development and well-being. Evidence from many studies highlights that cognitive processes may be adversely affected by vulnerable contexts. The aim of this study was to determine if living in vulnerable conditions affects childhood cognitive development. To achieve this...

Background Cognitive reserve, or the extent to which brain can cope with damage, is associated with extended healthy aging and with slow age-related cognitive decline, as well as a lower number of dementia-associated clinical cognitive signs. Thus, understanding how cognitive reserve might affect different cognitive abilities is important. This stu...

Background Several neurodegenerative conditions negatively impact linguistics skills. Despite this, many studies carried out with these kinds of patients either only include participants with initial stages of cognitive impairment either do not contemplate linguistic skills, or they do assess language in clinical or experimental settings. Due to it...

El modelo simple de lectura propone que son las dificultades en lenguaje oral las que impiden a los lectores buenos decodificadores entender bien un texto. Aunque no contempla el papel de las funciones ejecutivas, es probable que estas influyan en la comprensión lectora. En un anterior estudio, demostramos que una intervención diseñada para mejorar...

Growing up in low-SES backgrounds is known to be a risk factor for cognitive development, especially for language and executive functions performance. The main goal of the study was to obtain an objective measure of how vulnerability conditions impact in the main cognitive domains, comparing a vulnerable and non-vulnerable group of Guatemalan child...

Comunicación oral. Presentación del proyecto y discusión de resultados esperados.

Introducción/objetivos El bilingüismo puede ejercer efectos en el desarrollo de diversos dominios cognitivos, especialmente a nivel de funciones ejecutivas. Este hecho puede verse reflejado en el rendimiento en diferentes pruebas neuropsicológicas. El presente estudio pretende conocer el impacto que el bilingüismo puede tener en la evaluación neuro...

Reading comprehension is a complex task requiring many underlying skills. Syntactic awareness and morphological awareness are two such skills that have been shown to be related to reading comprehension. However, the majority of studies have been carried out in English, and very few have explored these skills in monolingual Spanish speaking children...

Many explanations accounting for rapid automatized naming's (RAN) relationship with reading have been proposed. One of the most debated perspectives argues that RAN measures orthographic processing, defined as the ability to process groups of letters or entire words as single units. Given that reading familiar spelling patterns will rely on orthogr...

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Background: The directionality of the relationship between impulsivity and heavy drinking patterns remains unclear. Recent research suggests it could be reciprocal and depends on different facets of impulsivity and different patterns of drinking. The aim of this study was to analyze this potential reciprocal relationship between self-reported and...

Objectives: Depression and loneliness are highly prevalent in old age. Moreover these mental health symptoms adversely affect the verbal fluency of the elderly. We examined the relationship between depression and loneliness with verbal fluency in people aged 50 years or older. Method: Research data were collected during the pilot study of the Longi...

Although the importance of vocabulary training in English speaking countries is well recognized and has been extensively studied, the same is not true for Spanish–few evidence based vocabulary studies for Spanish-speaking children have been reported. Here, two rich oral vocabulary training programs (definition and context), based on literature abou...

List of control words in alphabetical order. Note. Gram. Class = grammatical class (A = adjective, N = noun, V = verb); Freq/million = frequency of appearance per million words in written material (Martínez-Martín & García, 2004); Richness = number of different meanings; Productivity = number of derivatives. (DOCX)

Resumen en español (short summary in Spanish). Note. Referencia para el texto completo en inglés: Gomes-Koban, Simpson, Valle, & Defior. Oral vocabulary training program for Spanish third-graders with low socio-economic status: A randomized controlled trial. (DOCX)

List of intervention words in the order they were taught. Note. Gram. Class = grammatical class (A = adjective, N = noun, V = verb); Freq/million = frequency of appearance per million words in written material (Martínez-Martín & García, 2004); Richness = number of different meanings; Productivity = number of derivatives. (DOCX)

A lack of longitudinal studies impedes the understanding of whether visual processing skills significantly influence reading performance. The present study assessed if multi-element processing (MEP), a visual processing task comprising only non-verbal stimuli, was predominantly related with decoding or sight-word reading. One hundred Spanish pre-re...

One of the hallmarks of dyslexia is the failure to automatise written patterns despite repeated exposure to print. Although many explanations have been proposed to explain this problem, researchers have recently begun to explore the possibility that an underlying implicit learning deficit may play a role in dyslexia. This hypothesis has been invest...

Some research on literacy acquisition suggests that implicit learning processes may be related to reading and writing proficiency in English, which is a deep orthography. However, little research has been done to determine if the same is true in shallow orthographies. Here, we investigated whether the implicit learning ability of third grade Spanis...

Supplementary materials (appendices) for Calet, Gutiérrez-Palma, Simpson, González-Trujillo, & Sylvia Defior (2015)

Statistical learning (SL) studies have shown that participants are able to extract regularities in input they are exposed to without any instruction to do so. This and other findings, such as the fact that participants are often unable to verbalize their acquired knowledge, suggest that SL can occur implicitly or incidentally. Interestingly, severa...

Purpose This study was designed to shed light on the profile of reading ability in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A key aim was to examine the relationship between parent report of adaptive behavior and direct assessment of reading ability in these children. Method The authors investigated children's reading ability using the Wide R...

The data matrices for Simpson, Mousikou, Montoya & Defior (2013)

Implicit detection of statistical regularities is thought to be a ubiquitous facet of cognition; yet, we know little about statistical learning (SL) over time. A recent study showed that visual SL can be observed at 24 h post stimulus (Kim et al., 2009 [14]). Here we sought to obtain a finer-grained picture of visual SL over time. We employed an em...

Here, in the first study of its kind, we examined the spelling of letter names by 30 school children (mean age 11 years; range 10–12 years) and 24 adults (mean age 23 years; range 19–55 years). While there is no single agreed-upon spelling for each letter of the English alphabet, it is possible to determine whether a spelling pattern is an acceptab...

The study examined changes in visual attention in schizophrenia following training with a social-cognitive remediation package designed to improve facial emotion recognition (the Micro-Expression Training Tool; METT). Forty out-patients with schizophrenia were randomly allocated to active training (METT; n=26), or repeated exposure (RE; n=14); all...

To examine schizophrenia patients' visual attention to social contextual information during a novel mental state perception task. Groups of healthy participants (n = 26) and schizophrenia patients (n = 24) viewed 7 image pairs depicting target characters presented context-free and context-embedded (i.e., within an emotion-congruent social context)....

The brain has a powerful capacity for statistical learning–an ability to detect statistical regularities in the environment in order to make predictions and guide behaviour–often without conscious awareness. It has been claimed that statistical learning plays a key role in a range of everyday perceptual and cognitive processes including those assoc...