Jon Andoni Duñabeitia

Nebrija University · Centro de Investigación Nebrija en Cognición

Driving is a complex task necessitating an intricate interplay of sensory, motor, and cognitive abilities. Extensive research has underscored the role of neurocognitive functions, including attention, memory, executive functions, and visuospatial skills, in driving safety and performance. Despite evidence suggesting cognitive training's potential i...

Introduction Reading is a fundamental cognitive activity that is influenced by both textual and external environmental factors, although the latter has been less thoroughly explored. This study aims to examine the impact of environmental visual conditions on reading performance using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Methods We conducted two experi...

Similarity in mental, linguistic representations modulates the degree of recruitment of cognitive control mechanisms, which have been linked to neurocognitive adaptations in bilingual populations. While ample evidence exists for this claim, its coverage is limited, as testing is geared towards WEIRD communities that use sizeable, Indo-European lang...

Abstractionist models of visual word recognition can easily accommodate the absence of visual similarity effects in misspelled common words (e.g., viotin vs. viocin) during lexical decision tasks. However, these models fail to account for the sizable effects of visual similarity observed in misspelled brand names (e.g., anazon produces longer respo...

Exploring the dynamic interface of environmental psychology and psycholinguistics, this investigation delves into how simulated weather conditions - sunny versus rainy - affect emotional perceptions of linguistic stimuli within a Virtual Reality (VR) framework. Participants assessed words' emotional valence being exposed to these distinct environme...

While abstractionist theories of visual word recognition propose that perceptual elements like font and letter case are filtered out during lexical access, instance-based theories allow for the possibility that these surface details influence this process. To disentangle these accounts, we focused on brand names embedded in logotypes. The consisten...

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide...

Epilepsy, a prevalent neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures, significantly impacts individuals’ neurobiological, cognitive, and social lives. This report presents a feasibility study investigating the effects of a computerized cognitive training program on enhancing executive functions, particularly inhibitory control, in childr...

Introducción. En este estudio se investigó la posible existencia de diferencias en varios ámbitos o rasgos del constructo general de inteligencia emocional entre los menores con altas capacidades y sus pares de desarrollo normotípico. Método. Un grupo de menores con altas capacidades y un grupo de menores con desarrollo intelectual promedio complet...

Esta investigación analiza los insultos más frecuentemente recuperados en una prueba de disponibilidad léxica en el español actual de España. El objetivo es ofrecer un estudio desde una perspectiva cultural, cognitiva y lingüística e informar de ello a profesionales de la lengua. Para ello se elaboró un cuestionario digital donde los informantes de...

Recent studies suggest that similarity in emotional features and concreteness are critical cues underlying word association in native speakers. However, the lexical organization of a foreign language is less understood. This study aims to examine the structure of word associations within the mental lexicon of a foreign (English) and a native langua...

The scientific evidence regarding the possibility of transferring benefits derived from cognitive training focused on working memory and inhibitory control to reading skills in children aged 6 to 12 is inconclusive. This study carries out a systematic review of recent published studies on this topic with the aim of analysing the specific role of va...

This study established psycholinguistic norms in Cantonese for a set of 1286 colored pictures sourced from several picture databases, including 750 colored line drawings from MultiPic (Duñabeitia et al., 2018) and 536 photographs selected for McRae et al. (2005) concepts. The pictures underwent rigorous normalization processes. We provided picture...

The societal integration of autonomous vehicles (AVs) relies on public acceptance, closely related to individual emotions and perceptions. This study explores the emotional factors affecting AV acceptance in Spain through lexical tasks, virtual AV simulations, and questionnaires, surpassing traditional attitude surveys by examining subtle emotional...

This article reports on a large-scale study investigating the overall perception of multilingualism in the family environment of children enrolled in an English immersion program in primary schools across Spain and the potential relationship between these attitudes and the student’s academic performance. One thousand and one families participated i...

Este estudio busca determinar si existe discriminación lingüística hacia individuos percibidos como extranjeros por perfilado de su forma de hablar cuando llaman para acceder a pisos de alquiler. Trabajos anteriores apuntan a que esto es posible y ocurre en otros países. Nuestra investigación se basa en 288 llamadas telefónicas a anuncios de alquil...

The extent to which languages share properties reflecting the non-linguistic constraints of the speakers who speak them is key to the debate regarding the relationship between language and cognition. A critical case is spatial communication, where it has been argued that semantic universals should exist, if anywhere. Here, using an experimental par...

Brand names are valuable company assets often accompanied by a unique graphical composition (i.e., as logotypes). Recent research has demonstrated that this uniqueness makes brand names and logotypes susceptible to counterfeiting through misspelling by transposition in tasks that require participants to identify correct spellings. However, our unde...

Driving is a critical aspect of personal mobility and autonomy, but ensuring road safety requires a comprehensive evaluation of driving abilities beyond self-reported behaviors and practical skills. This article emphasizes the importance of cognitive assessment in determining fitness to drive and explores the potential benefits of using digital too...

Cognitive decline usually begins after individuals reach maturity, which is more evident in late adulthood. Rapid and constant cognitive screenings allow early detection of cognitive decline and motivate individuals to participate in prevention interventions. Due to accelerated technological advances, cognitive screening and training are now availa...

The societal integration of autonomous vehicles (AVs) hinges significantly on public acceptance, intricately tied to individuals' emotional responses and perceptions. This study delves into the emotional components influencing AV acceptance among the Spanish population, employing a three-pronged methodological approach: lexical selection tasks, a v...

Driving is a crucial aspect of personal independence, and accurate assessment of driving skills is vital for ensuring road safety. This study aimed to identify reliable cognitive predictors of safe driving through a driving simulator experiment. We assessed the driving performance of 66 university students in two distinct simulated driving conditio...

Professor Albert Costa (1972-2018) was one of the most influential scholars in the fields of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. This book provides a faithful look at the most relevant lines of research in which he worked during his academic career. Written by some of his close collaborators and friends, the book presents a coherent summary of the...

Professor Albert Costa (1972-2018) was one of the most influential scholars in the fields of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. This book provides a faithful look at the most relevant lines of research in which he worked during his academic career. Written by some of his close collaborators and friends, the book presents a coherent summary of the...

Caring for children with developmental and epileptic encephalopathies (DEE) can be challenging for primary caregivers due to the complexity of the condition and the need to provide ongoing care. This has a psychosocial impact on their quality of life, including increased stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as an impact on their support network...

Using a self-determination theory framework, this quasi-experimental study focused on designing and implementing online training for primary school teachers to help them develop a motivating style, reduce their burnout and support their students' psychological needs, autonomous motivation, agentic engagement, and academic achievement during the COV...

Given the enormous influence of executive functions in school and life success, it is necessary to identify EF levels and address them in a reliable way with tools accessible to practitioners. Two studies were conducted. In study 1, the psychometric properties of the Spanish version Children’s Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI) in a representa...

This study examined the psychosocial impact on parents of children affected by Dravet Syndrome (DS), a rare drug-resistant developmental encephalopathic epileptic syndrome which affects children at an early age and that involves severe cognitive, behavioral, and motor impairments. DS has a major negative impact on caregivers, mainly on their physic...

Previous literature has suggested the existence of a close relationship between individuals’ intellectual abilities and their cognitive profile, understood as their performance in tasks tapping into the different cognitive domains. This relationship has typically been discussed in populations characterized as having high intellectual abilities, as...

The sense of touch is underrepresented in cognitive psychology research. One of the reasons is that controlling the timing of stimulus presentation, which is a hallmark of cognitive research, is significantly more difficult for tactile stimuli than visual or auditory stimuli. In the present work, we present a system to display tactile stimuli (brai...

Introduction Recent research has reported that adding non-existent diacritical marks to a word produces a minimal reading cost compared to the intact word. Here we examined whether this minimal reading cost is due to: (1) the resilience of letter detectors to the perceptual noise (i.e., the cost should be small and comparable for words and nonwords...

Cognitive assessment is a common and daily process in educational, clinical, or research settings, among others. Currently, most professionals use classic pencil-and-paper screenings, tests, and assessment batteries. However, as the SARS-CoV-2 health crisis has shown, the pencil-and-paper format is becoming increasingly outdated and it is necessary...

Brand names are valuable company assets often accompanied by a unique graphical composition (i.e., as logotypes). Recent research has demonstrated that this uniqueness makes brand names and logotypes susceptible to counterfeiting through misspelling by transposition in tasks that require participants to identify correct spellings. However, our unde...

Cancer patients assert that after chemotherapy their cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Cognitive stimulation is the clinical treatment of choice for reversing cognitive decline. The current study describes a computerized home-based cognitive stimulation program in patients who survived breast cancer. It aims to assess safety and effectiveness...

Background Sleep disturbances represent a major health burden today, affecting up to one-third of the population worldwide. Computerized cognitive stimulation has been proven as an effective approach in diminishing negative symptomatology and improving the quality of life in a range of medical conditions. Given its nature in enhancing neural networ...

The current pilot study was set to evaluate the feasibility and potential benefit of a personalized computerized cognitive training (CCT) intervention to improve cognitive function among people living with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC). Seventy three adults who self-reported cognitive dysfunction more than 3 months after a diagnosis of COV...

We explore whether emoji were associatively linked to emotion concepts represented in emotion-laden words, in line with the Associative-Propositional Evaluation model. Specifically, we tested these principles by exploring whether emotionally-congruent emoji could enhance word processing (Study 1 & 2) and recall (Study 3). In Study 1, participants c...

Background: Using a foreign language can influence emotion modulation, but whether different psychotherapy processes would be affected by a foreign language is still unclear. The current study explored the foreign language effect on the extinction of fear. Method: During the conditioning phase, part of the neutral stimuli presented to the partic...

Aims and Objectives Translation equivalents intuitively seem to overlap in meaning. Moreover, the models of the bilingual lexicon often represent the meaning shared between two translations as a holistic node in the semantic network. However, research on semantic representation and processing questions this holistic approach. For instance, abstract...

Introduction At present, numerous studies can be found in which influences and relationships between the principal executive functions, reading comprehension, and academic performance associated with reading are reported. However, there is still a lack of convergence regarding the impact of computerized cognitive training on children’s executive de...

Letter-similarity effects are elusive with common words in lexical decision experiments: viotin and viocin (base word: violin) produce similar error rates and rejection latencies. However, they are robust for stimuli often presented with the same appearance (e.g., misspelled logotypes such as anazon [base word: amazon] produce more errors and longe...

This study addresses the social relevance of low-prevalence childhood diseases and reports the process of generation and validation of a tool to assess the social impact on the direct family environment and the social context of reference. The aim of the process of construction and validation of this instrument is to provide the field with a tool w...

Executive functions are the key ingredient for behaviour regulation. Among them, inhibitory control is one of the main exponents of executive functions, and in the last decades, it has received a good amount of attention thanks to the development of chronometric tasks associated with paradigms that allow exploring human behaviour when the inhibitor...

Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilin-gualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolin-guals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: mee...

Previous research has shown that changes in the scenarios in which something is learned and recalled, respectively, may result in a subpar performance in memory recollection. The current study aimed to evaluate how changes in the visuo-perceptual environmental learning context impact incidental vocabulary learning. To this end, a highly immersive v...

Advances and easier accessibility of Virtual Reality (VR) technology are opening up new opportunities for researchers to conduct laboratory experiments under more ecologically valid yet controlled conditions. In the current study, we investigated the feasibility of utilizing VR in experimental psychology using three classical paradigms: a flanker t...

This preprint describes a Phase I/II home-based computerized cognitive stimulation program for insomnia. After stipulating the maximum tolerable training dose, patients in a public hospital diagnosed with insomnia underwent 15 consecutive days of computerized cognitive stimulation intervention. The results determined the inexistence of undesirable...

Background: Long COVID, also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 or PASC,is a systemic syndrome affecting a large number of persons in the aftermath of the pandemic. Cognitive dysfunction (or brain fog) is one of its most common manifestations of PACS, and there are no effective interventions to mitigate it. Home-based personalized computerize...

The present study intended to investigate, first, the impact of semantic clustering on the recall and recognition of incidentally learned words in a new language, and second, how the interaction between semantic clustering and frequency of occurrence may modulate learning. To that end, Spanish university students watched an intentionally created vi...

In this study, we present word prevalence data (i.e., the number of people who know a given word) for 40,777 Catalan words. An online massive visual lexical decision task involving more than 200,000 native speakers of this language was carried out. The characteristics of the participants as well as those of the words which mostly influence word kno...

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered our routines, our conversations, the specific social contexts in which we hear or use certain words, and potentially, the representation of the words related to the disease and its consequences. Here we investigated whether the effects of the pandemic have changed the representation of the affective features of COV...

Introduction. The assessment of student motivation can be a powerful tool for understanding the factors that can influence the school environment, where students, families, teachers, psychologists or administration can develop interventions related to the improvement of learning through the motivational style based on the Self-Determination Theory...

Research on the different components of fluid intelligence and how they relate to each other is quite extensive. Meanwhile, when it comes to crystallized intelligence, only vocabulary size has been somewhat thoroughly studied, while other key components, such as general knowledge, remain largely unexplored. This study aims to further our understand...

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However,...

A growing consensus sees the bilingual lexicon as an integrated, nonselective system. However, the way bilingual experience shapes the architecture and functioning of the lexicon is not well understood. This study investigates bilingual lexical-semantic representation and processing employing written translation priming. We focus on the role of act...

Executive functions have become a popular research topic since the beginning of the century. Their central role in our daily routines makes them the most representative form of behaviour regulation. Even though there is no general agreement about how they can be classified, there is common consensus that cognitive scientists need to understand thei...

Executive functions are the key ingredient for behavior regulation. Among them, Inhibitory control is one of main exponents of executive functions, and in the last decades it has received a good amount of attention thanks to the development of chronometric tasks associated with paradigms that allowed exploring human behaviour when the inhibitory co...

How words are interrelated in the human mind is a scientific topic on which there is still no consensus, with different views on how word co-occurrence and semantic relatedness mediate word association. Recent research has shown that lexical associations are strongly predicted by the similarity of those words in terms of valence, arousal, and concr...

Letter position coding in word recognition has been widely investigated in the visual modality (e.g., labotarory is confusable with laboratory), but not as much in the tactile modality using braille, leading to an incomplete understanding of whether this process is modality-dependent. Unlike sighted readers, braille readers do not show a transposed...

Self-Determination Theory conceptualizes basic psychological needs (BPN) for autonomy, competence and relatedness as essentials for the learner to experience, maintain, and promote well-being, personal growth, and learning. However, the evidence of its influence in the classroom is still limited, especially in basic education (ages six to 14). The...

Insomnia is a frequent and heightened pathology in the general population of developed countries, and its condition generally leads to health discomfort and performance drop in daily and work-related tasks. As current pharmacological treatments for insomnia do not always seem sufficient to mitigate impairment, contemporary cognitive approaches migh...

We investigated the role of age and gender in cognitive estimation abilities. Participants completed two online tasks, where different categories of estimation were assessed (speed estimation by time and distance, and auditory estimation). Data from a total of 18886 participants (9911 females) with ages between 18 and 65 years old were gathered. Re...

The VIDAS data set (Verbal Interaction Dataset of Acquired Spanish) presents data from 200 participants from different countries and language backgrounds (50 Philippines with L1 Tagalog; 50 Ukrainians with L1 Ukrainian; 50 Moroccans with L1Arabic; 50 Romanians with L1 Romanian). They completed an oral expression and interaction test in the context...

Research on reading comprehension in immigrant students is heterogeneous and conflicting. Differences in socioeconomic status and cultural origins are very likely confounds in determining whether differences to native pupils can be attributed to immigrant status. We collected data on 312 Spanish students of Native, of Hispanic origin–therefore with...

In terms of critical skills for academic achievement, the literature has revealed that the development of executive functions (EF) plays a key role. Although numerous researchers have aimed to improve EF through computerized cognitive training interventions, the evidence of the effect derived from these interventions remains ambiguous. The purpose...

Background: Given the impact of lexical properties such as valence, arousal, and concreteness in language processing, recent computational methods have been designed to extrapolate these values from different sources, such as word co-occurrence or word association corpora. These methods have been proven to be particularly successful approaches to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought severe impact on language learners' emotional states and their performance in creativity. Yet, their ability to regulate emotions is cr