Marcos Díaz-Lago

University of Deusto | DEUSTO · Faculty of Health Sciences

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing...

Previous studies have provided evidence of the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement violations using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Other studies have explored ERP patterns evoked by emotional words in isolation. This study investigates the time course of the processing of emotional words embedded in a sentence context u...

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with an intelligent category (“professor”) subsequently performed 13.1% better on a trivia test than participants primed with an unintelligent category (“soccer hooligans”). Two unpublished replications of this study by the original authors, designed to verify the appropriate...

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of a foreign language on the causality bias (i.e., the illusion that two events are causally related when they are not). We predict that using a foreign language could reduce the illusions of causality. A total of 36 native English speakers participated in Experiment 1, 80 native Spanish spe...

Previous studies have shown that the price of a given product impacts the perceived quality of such product. This finding was also observed in medical contexts, showing that expensive drugs increase the placebo effect compared to inexpensive ones. However, addressing a drug's efficacy requires making causal inferences between the drug and the heali...

Previous studies have demonstrated that fluency affects judgment and decision-making. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of perceptual fluency in a causal learning task that usually induces an illusion of causality in non-contingent conditions. We predicted that a reduction of fluency could improve accuracy in the det...

Many experiments have shown that humans and other animals can detect contingency between events accurately. This learning is used to make predictions and to infer causal relationships, both of which are critical for survival. Under certain conditions, however, people tend to overestimate a null contingency. We argue that a successful theory of cont...

The present article reports an ERP study with two experiments designed to assess the influence of emotional adjectives on sentence processing by means of a gender agreement (grammaticality) judgment task. Participants were shown transitive sentences in Spanish presented word-by-word, with a complex object-NP consisting of a noun + an adjective + so...

Previous studies in this field (Fraga, Piñeiro, et al. 2012) have shown that the emotional dimension of ‘arousal’ (which ranges from calmness to excitation) plays a significant role when participants are asked to complete ambiguous sentences with the following structure: ‘... NP-de-NP + RC…’. In particular, high arousal nouns in Spanish tend to sem...

Abstract: Previous research has shown the impact of lexical properties of nouns, like animacy or the emotional dimension of words (i.e., valence and arousal), on processing relative clauses (RC) preceded by a double antecedent (e.g.: Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony). For instance, in completion studies it has been fou...