Odir Antonio Rodriguez-Villagra

University of Costa Rica | UCR · Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP), Centro de Investigación en Neurociencias

Global initiatives call for further understanding of the impact of inequity on aging across underserved populations. Previous research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) presents limitations in assessing combined sources of inequity and outcomes (i.e., cognition and functionality). In this study, we assessed how social determinants of heal...

This study sought to evaluate the roles of and interactions between cognitive processes that have been shown to exhibit impact from socioeconomic status (SES) and living conditions in predicting social adaptation (SA) in a population of adults living in socially vulnerable conditions. Participants included 226 people between the ages of 18 and 60 w...

Adverse environments cause well-established detrimental effects on subjects living there. They ultimately increase the likelihood of developing negative cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes. However, these adverse effects are not ubiquitous across all people. While some individuals develop maladaptive behavior and seem unable to cope with thes...

The main purpose of this study was to examine the age-related changes in inhibitory control of 450 children at the ages of 7-8, 11-12, and 14-16 when controlling for working memory capacity (WMC) and processing speed to determine whether inhibition is an independent factor far beyond its possible reliance on the other two factors. This examination...

The aim of the present study was to identify different executive functioning profiles within 2, 6, and 10 scholar grades using a three-step Latent Profile Analysis. In Step 1, unconditional LPA models are estimated, and the selected model is used in the next step. In Step 2, the most likely profile memberships are estimated from the posterior proba...

Schoolchildren with better executive functioning skills achieve better mathematics results. It is less clear is how inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory combine to predict mathematics achievement and difficulty throughout primary and secondary school. The study aimed to find the best combination of executive functions for predictin...

Human beings often fall prey to fallacious reasoning. One influential view holds that reasoners endorsing fallacies do not commit logical errors but rather that they endorse such fallacies on pragmatic grounds, i.e. by tacitly considering a conditional premise (If you wash my car, I will give you $10) a biconditional one (I will give you $10, if an...

This study sought to evaluate the roles of and interactions between cognitive processes that have been shown to exhibit impact from socioeconomic status (SES) and living conditions in predicting social adaptation (SA) in a population of adults living in socially vulnerable conditions. Participants included 226 people between the ages of 18 and 60 w...

Un nivel adecuado de comprensión lectora es imprescindible para desempeñarse exitosamente en la educación universitaria, de allí la importancia de la investigación y el mejoramiento de esta destreza cognitiva. El objetivo del presente artículo de revisión bibliográfica es explorar algunos mecanismos cognitivos que influyen en la capacidad de compre...

n recent years, questions have emerged regarding if it is possible to train executive functions and if music, for its high level of complexity, has an impact on these processes. Even though there is a relation between musical training and executive functions, this results are contradictory and there is no quantification of this potential associatio...

The latent structure of executive functions (EFs) remains controversial. Confirmatory factorial analysis (CFA) has provided support for both multidimensional (assumes EFs to be functionally separable but related components) and bifactor (proposes all components are nested within a common factor) models. However, these CFA models have never been com...

Extracto En este trabajo se ha llevado a cabo un estudio de seguimiento ocular de 20 estudiantes de Ciencias de la Computación de la Universidad de Costa Rica, la mitad de ellos de primer curso y la otra mitad de cuarto. Se les pidió que resolvieran 10 ejercicios de diagramas de flujo y 10 de pseudocódigo. En los alumnos expertos, aproximadamente l...

Se ha sugerido que la práctica profesional de un instrumento musical esta relacionada con mejores puntajes en tareas de funciones ejecutivas. Con el fin de examinar sistemáticamente esta hipótesis se realizó un metaanálisis para identificar el efecto de la interpretación de un instrumento en las funciones ejecutivas, así como las variables que podr...

Social factors, such as social cognition skills (SCS) and social determinants of health (SDH), may be vital for mental health, even when compared with classical psycho-physical predictors (demographic, physical, psychiatric, and cognitive factors). Although major risk factors for psychiatric disorders have been previously assessed, the relative wei...

Despite many years of research efforts and clinical trials the prognosis of patients diagnosed with glioblastoma remains very poor. The oligodendrocyte transcription factor 2 (Olig2) was identified as a marker for glioma stem cells, which are believed to be responsible for glioma recurrence and therapy resistance. In this retrospective analysis we...

Social factors, such as social cognition skills (SCS) and social determinants of health (SDH), may be vital for mental health, even when compared with classical psycho-physical predictors (demographic, physical, psychiatric, and cognitive factors). Although major risk factors for psychiatric disorders have been previously assessed, the relative wei...

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar si las diferencias individuales en capacidad de la memoria de trabajo e inteligencia fluida durante la edad preescolar predicen las calificaciones en las materias básicas al finalizar el primer año de escuela primaria. Para ello se aplicaron pruebas cognitivas a 132 estudiantes de preescolares públicos costa...

The present article, of quantitative cut, aims at testing –via linear logistic test model (LLTM)– a set of cognitive operations (i.e., rules) influencing the item difficulty of a fluid intelligence test on different samples of students. In Study 1, high school students (n = 1751) were randomly assigned to study and validation samples. The former sa...

Habituation is the ability to passively reduce a response after repeated or prolonged exposures to a particular stimulus. From a cognitive perspective, habituation is a basic, information-gating process that contributes to filter out irrelevant information in order to focus cognitive sources on a specific goal. In higher order capabilities as in sp...

Asking children to clarify themselves promotes their ability to uniquely identify objects in referential communication tasks. However, little is known about whether parents ask preschoolers for clarification during interactions and, if so, how. Study 1 explored how mothers clarify their preschoolers’ ambiguous descriptions of the characters in thei...

The presence of inflammation and demyelination in a central nervous system (CNS) biopsy points towards a limited, yet heterogeneous group of pathologies, of which multiple sclerosis (MS) represents one of the principal considerations. Inflammatory demyelination has also been reported in patients with clinically suspected primary central nervous sys...

div data-canvas-width="670.5116470588235">Los modelos de variables latentes y los modelos cognitivos formales comparten algunos aspectos de su objeto de estudio, varios aspectos filosóficos y parte de su metodología. A pesar de ello, existe poca comunicación entre sus teorías y hallazgos. Con el objetivo de resaltar similitudes y diferencias entre...

Resumen. El objetivo de la presente revisión fue proponer algunas recomendaciones para aquellos psicólogos cognitivos interesados en incorporar el estudio del sistema nervioso en sus investigaciones. Primero, son presentadas algunas resistencias de científicos cognitivos y neurocientíficos para incorporar las teorías de la neurociencia o la psicolo...

In many cognitive activities, the temporary maintenance and manipulation of mental objects is a necessary step in order to reach a cognitive goal. Working memory has been regarded as the process responsible for those cognitive activities. This thesis addresses the question: what limits working-memory capacity (WMC)? A question that still remains co...

We tested the limits of working-memory capacity (WMC) of young adults, old adults, and children with a memory-updating task. The task consisted of mentally shifting spatial positions within a grid according to arrows, their color signaling either only go (control) or go/no-go conditions. The interference model (IM) of Oberauer and Kliegl (2006) was...

The purpose of this study was to expose validity and reliability of three teacher's ratings scales of socials behaviors in one sample (N=262) of preschoolers and scholars (grade one) Costa Ricans children. We design one scale of prosocial behavior (ECPRO) and other to evaluate the ability of exploiter the other's expertise (EXHAD). Moreover we adap...

En este artículo se analiza el desempeño de niños y niñas en la resolución de tareas de falsa-creencia y se explora la posible influencia del desarrollo de las habilidades verbales sobre las diferencias de rendimiento entre ambos sexos en dichas tareas. El trabajo incluye dos estudios: En el Estudio 1 se comparó el entendimiento de la falsa-creenci...

Resumen:La teoría de la mente refiere a la habilidad para predecir y explicar el comportamiento de los demás, haciendo referencia a sus estados mentales internos, y es considerada como un aspecto fundamental del desar rollo cognitivo durante los años preescolares. Por otra parte, la capacidad de memoria de trabajo es un sistema que permite mantener...

La teoría de la mente refiere a la habilidad para predecir y explicar el comportamiento de los demás, haciendo referencia a sus estados mentales internos, y es considerada como un aspecto fundamental del desarrollo cognitivo durante los años preescolares. Por otra parte, la capacidad de memoria de trabajo es un sistema que permite mantener en mente...

In order to determine the effect of postnatal environments on some behavioral and neurochemical depressive-like parameters, male Sprague-Dawley rats were reared from weaning in either social isolation, standard laboratory conditions, or environmental enrichment. Open-field activity was assessed at postnatal days 37, 65, 93 and 107 and 1 h before th...

Developmental and social factors are known to play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of affective disorders. Although it has been demonstrated that early life aversive experiences can be a risk factor in the development of human depression, most of the investigation in animals that try to model depression do not include postnatal manipulations. Si...

La hipótesis que ha dominado el conocimiento de la depresión durante los últimos 50 años, la hipótesis de las monoaminas, está siendo desplazada por el desarrollo de otros modelos psicobiológicos. Uno de los modelos más importantes es el de la disfunción del eje hipotalámico – hipofisiario – suprarrenal (HHS), que relaciona los acontecimientos...

Estudiamos la validez y confiabilidad de tres escalas para eva- luar conductas sociales niños y niñas costarricenses de preescolar y primer grado (n=262). Una de las escalas evalúa el comportamiento prosocial (ECPRO), otra evalúa la habilidad de explotar la experticia de los demás (EXHAD), y una más evalúa el comportamiento maquiavélico (EMach) en...