Maria Julia Hermida

National Scientific and Technical Research Council | conicet · Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham

This special issue focuses on a geographic region rather than a typical topic or theme. The reason is that Latin American research on infancy has been so underrepresented in mainstream journals that we felt it deserved a dedicated special issue. Focusing on a specific topic would have decreased the plurality of research as countries do not necessar...

Child temperament is a predictor of non‐verbal ability (i.e. thinking and problem‐solving skills that do not fundamentally require verbal language production and comprehension). Given that temperament scores might vary depending on whether the reporter is a parent or a teacher, this study analyses (a) whether those reports are different and (b) how...

El proceso de deliberación fomenta la participación de la ciudadanía al incrementar las competencias cívicas, como el conocimiento y el interés político, la calidad argumentativa y deliberativa, los niveles de cercanía con lo político y la tolerancia al desacuerdo. Sin embargo, ¿es esto realmente así? ¿Cuáles son las competencias cívicas que efecti...

Chagas is a zoonotic disease conditioned by the need to eliminate or control the vector in human settlements before targeting infected individuals. Simultaneously it is necessary to raise awareness of health problems generated by chronic Chagas disease (ChD), for people to participate actively in vector control programs that will then enable the im...

Temperament is one of the factors that explain individual differences in child cognition, and it is usually measured through parental reports. Few studies showed that temperament reports varied depending on whether the reporter is a parent or a teacher, but a quite unexplored question is how each report predicts child cognition. This study analyzes...

In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a cognitive training tool that aims to improve children's mathematical ability through the use of technology in rural primary schools in Argentina. We conducted a large cluster randomized trial: schools in the treatment group used an app to train mathematical skills, while those in the control group receive...

This book aims to present theoretical and practical innovations in the cognitive sciences and education fields focusing on studies and research conducted with non-WEIRD (i.e., western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, especially from Latin America. Cognitive sciences and neuroscience have increased exponentially their kno...

There is an enormous corpus of literature dissecting the effects of poverty on child cognitive development. Nonetheless, almost all of it has made focus on urban poverty. This chapter is aimed at describing child cognitive development in Latin American (LA) rural contexts. Rural poverty in LA is very different from rural contexts in non-Western, Ed...

Cognitive sciences and neurosciences have advanced enormously during the last decades not only in the understanding of how mind and brain work but also in how that knowledge can be considered to improve educational practice. However, most of the evidence in this issue came from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societi...

Resumen: El objetivo del artículo es explorar la posibilidad de establecer un diálogo disciplinar entre abordajes de la educación que aparecen distantes y con pocos puntos de contacto: la pedagogía de Paulo Freire y la neurociencia educacional. Se propone un marco teórico que diferencia tipos y niveles de análisis del fenómeno educativo, buscando s...

There is narrow evidence on which strategies are most effective for disseminating information on dengue prevention. This is particularly relevant because social habits have a great prevention capacity for dengue. We investigated how effective are children as health educators, and how much they learn as they teach. We recruited 142 children and 97 p...

In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a cognitive training tool that aims to improve children's mathematical ability through the use of technology in rural primary schools in Argentina. We conducted a large cluster randomized trial: schools in the treatment group used an app to train mathematical skills, while those in the control group receive...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02735.].

In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a cognitive training tool that aims to improve children’s mathematical ability through technology in rural primary schools in Argentina. We conducted a large cluster-randomized trial: schools in the treatment group used an app to train mathematical skills, while schools in the control group received a liter...

The association between environmental factors and cognitive performance during childhood could be mediated by poverty (i.e., households with Unsatisfied or Satisfied Basic Needs). This study explored such mediating roles in preschoolers from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Tasks to assess executive attention, working memory, inhibitory control...

This article is a review of the current state of interaction between research into the cognitive sciences and mathematics learning in Argentina. It will firstly outline the main guidelines of Argentina’s current educational curricula in regard to the learning of mathematics. Secondly, the results Argentina obtained in international standardized tes...

Aunque el lavado de manos evita enfermedades infecciosas graves a bajo costo, sólo una de cada cinco personas se lava las manos después de ir al baño. Este estudio presenta una intervención diseñada interdisciplinariamente, corta y económica para promover el conocimiento sobre el lavado de manos en niños de 10 años y dos estudios piloto para evalua...

Aunque el lavado de manos evita enfermedades infecciosas graves a bajo costo, sólo una de cada cinco personas se lava las manos después de ir al baño. Este estudio presenta una intervención diseñada interdisciplinariamente, corta y económica para promover el conocimiento sobre el lavado de manos en niños de 10 años y dos estudios piloto para evalua...

Extreme poverty all over the world is concentrated in rural settings. However, studies about cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part conducted in urban populations. This paper investigates, in a poor rural sample, what are the individual and socioenvironmental variables that make the difference in performance in a...

While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions an...

En el marco de un proyecto de intervención, orientado a optimizar el desempeño cognitivo a través de actividades de juego para madres y sus hijos, este estudio presenta los resultados de un análisis de asociación entre factores (a) individuales (i.e. cortisol; actividad electroencefalográfica; lenguaje; y salud), y (b) contextuales (i.e. caracterís...

Different ways of solving planning and spatial working memory tasks generate different taskperformance profiles. Tests were administered to 346 (planning) and 427 (spatial working memory) Argentinean children from different socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds. A cross-sectional design was performed to explore eventual variable profiles of performance t...

Background: Teachers’ conceptions and misconceptions about neuroscience are crucial in establishing a proper dialogue between neuroscience and education. In recent years, studies in different countries have examined primary and secondary school teachers’ conceptions. However, although preschool education has proved its importance to later academic...

For at least eight decades, researchers have analyzed the association between childhood poverty and cognitive development in different societies worldwide, but few of such studies have been carried out in Latin America. The aim of the present paper is to systematically review the empirical studies that have analyzed the associations between poverty...

Significance Executive functions (EF) imply processes critical for purposeful, goal-directed behavior. In children, evidence derived from laboratory measures indicates that training can improve EF. However, this hypothesis has never been explicitly examined based on real-world measures, especially of educational achievement. Here, we investigate wh...

The association between socioeconomic status and child cognitive development, and the positive impact of interventions aimed at optimizing cognitive performance, are well-documented. However, few studies have examined how specific socio-environmental factors may moderate the impact of cognitive interventions among poor children. In the present stud...

Introducción: Uno de los temas actuales en la agenda del estudio del desarrollo de los procesos cognitivos de control es analizar la estructura latente del desempeño. Dos temas centrales en el área son: (a) evaluar si tal estructura se basa en un constructo unitario o en un conjunto de procesos disociables; y (b) determinar el rol que tienen los pr...

Working memory and planning are fundamental cognitive skills supporting fluid reasoning. We show that 2 games that train working memory and planning skills in school-aged children promote transfer to 2 different tasks: an attentional test and a fluid reasoning test. We also show long-term improvement of planning and memory capacities in 8-year-old...

Attentional control, working memory, and planning paradigms associated with prefrontalexecutive subsystems have been administered to compare the non-verbal executive control performance of healthy children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, mediations of several sociodemographic variables, identified in the literature as part of...

Child poverty and child development are complex and multidimensional phenomena. The study of their interaction involves the analysis of different biological and psychosocial components within a continuous, dynamic, and growing interaction (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Evans, 2004; Lipina & Colombo, 2009). Hence, their study requires the involvement of m...

El presente estudio explora el valor predictivo del nivel socioeconómico, la salud mental materna y el temperamento infantil sobre el desempeño en la prueba de redes atencionales (ANT), que evalúa procesos atencionales de alerta, orientación y control, administrada a 203 niños de 4 y 5 años (M = 4.78; DE = .59), provenientes de hogares con y sin ne...

La modulación del desempeño cognitivo por pobreza infantil se asocia a la presencia de diferentes factores individuales y contextuales. El presente estudio propone analizar el valor predictivo de nivel socioeconómico, salud mental materna y temperamento sobre el desempeño en una tarea con demandas de atención. Se administró a 203 niños de edad pree...

El análisis del impacto de la pobreza infantil sobre el desempeño cognitivo, es abordado generalmente por medio de pruebas estandarizadas. La implementación de paradigmas de evaluación de procesos cognitivos de control, genera la posibilidad de introducir mayor especificidad. Este estudio presenta resultados de la administración de una batería de p...

Las competencias de autorregulación son críticas para el desarrollo cognitivo, socio-emocional y académico adecuado, desde etapas tempranas del desarrollo infantil hasta la vida adulta (Kirkwood et al., 2008). Desde la perspectiva del desarrollo, la eficiencia de estas habilidades depende de la plasticidad de redes cerebrales específicas, que están...

Tanto la pobreza como el desarrollo cognitivo son fenómenos complejos y multidimensionales. El estudio de los mismos involucra el análisis de diferentes componentes biológicos y psicosociales, dentro de una interacción continua, dinámica y creciente (Beddington et al., 2008; Bradley y Corwyn, 2002; Brooks-Gunn y Duncan, 1997; Evans, 2004; Gordon et...

Since both child poverty and development are characterized by their multidimensional nature, the study of the underlying mechanisms involved in their interactions, as well as the design of interventions aimed at modifying them, require the incorporation of multidisciplinary frameworks that consider different epistemological, historic, cultural, eth...

Several studies carried out since the second half of the XXth century have demonstrated that poverty significantly influences child cognitive and emotional development. In the last decades, several intervention programs have been implemented to optimize the development of children living in poverty. Some of them had positive effects, and also allow...

El desarrollo infantil es un proceso complejo que involucra múltiples fenómenos a nivel de las competencias cognitivas, emocionales y sociales. Las oportunidades de desarrollo varían significativamente de acuerdo a la presencia de factores de vulnerabilidad social en los contextos de crianza. En particular, el impacto de la pobreza sobre el desarro...

The debates on the potential interdisciplinary association between neuroscience and education began approximately three decades ago. In order for the integration of neuroscientific and educational knowledge to impact on learning and teaching it would imply the consideration of the emergence of several cognitive and emotional processes during develo...

Neurocognitive Approaches in the Study of Child Poverty: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations. Several studies carried out since the second half of the XXth century have demonstrated that poverty significantly influences child cognitive and emotional development. In the last decades, several intervention programs have been implemented to op...

La presente ponencia tiene por objeto exponer algunos avances de la puesta en marcha del Proyecto de Investigación “Construcción multidisciplinaria de propuestas de enseñanza para optimizar competencias cognitivas y la adquisición de aprendizajes escolares tempranos (Matemática y Lengua) en niños y niñas de 4 y 5 años en riesgo social”, que se prop...

Working memory, inhibitory control and planning paradigms, were used to evaluate executive performance of healthy children (N=208, 3-to 5-years-old) from poor (P) and non-poor (NP) homes (poverty criteria: UBN method). Significant differences were observed between groups in AnotB (working memory and inhibitory control) (MANOVA, Delay 10 sec, Correc...

Previous studies showed negative impact of poverty (UBN method) on executive performance in healthy preschoolers. Two (T1, T2) multimodular cognitive training interventions [T1: N= 237; T2 N=382) were applied in two new cohorts (3-5 years). Intervention Groups received individual (T1, T2) or group (T2) weekly sessions of training in tasks demanding...