
Pedro R. MontoroNational University of Distance Education | UNED · Department of Basic Psychology I
Pedro R. Montoro
PhD in Psychology
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Publications
Publications (69)
Algorithms are involved in decisions ranging from trivial to significant, but people often express distrust toward them. Research suggests that educational efforts to explain how algorithms work may help mitigate this distrust. In a study of 1,921 participants from 20 countries, we examined differences in algorithmic trust for low-stakes and high-s...
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 dissociation between conscious and unconscious perception is one of the most relevant issues in the study of human cognition. While there is evidence suggesting that some stimuli might be unconsciously processed up to its meaning (e.g., high-level stimulus processing), some authors claim that most results on the processing of subliminal stimuli...
The study of consciousness is considered by many one of the most difficult contemporary scientific endeavors and confronts several methodological and theoretical challenges. A central issue that makes the study of consciousness so challenging is that, while the rest of science is concerned with problems that can be verified from a "third person" vi...
While most research on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has focused on exploring the candidate event related potentials (ERP) components associated to visual awareness, much less is known about the temporal dynamics associated to those correlates. In the present study, we will measure the temporal dynamics of visual awareness as a funct...
Casasanto (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 351-367, 2009) conceptualised the body-specificity hypothesis by empirically finding that right-handed people tend to associate a positive valence with the right side and a negative valence with the left side, whilst left-handed people tend to associate a positive valence with the left si...
The dissociation between conscious and unconscious perception is one of the most controversial issues in the study of consciousness. Some authors argue in favor of the existence of high-level unconscious processing, while others claim that most of the results obtained can be explained by a mixture of methodological issues and erroneous (or at least...
The study of consciousness is considered by many one of the most difficult contemporary scientific endeavours and confronts several methodological and theoretical challenges. A central issue that makes the study of consciousness so challenging is that, while the rest of science is concerned with problems that can be verified from a "third person" v...
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of task content in the illusion of control effect (i.e. the tendency to overestimate our chances of success beyond the objective probabilities). A secondary exploratory objective was to analyze individual differences in task performance. Methods: A total of 88 participants (36 aerospac...
Previous research on incidental memory in everyday settings has shown that frequent exposure to stimuli does not guarantee accurate representation in memory. In two studies, we explored the memory and metamemory of car brand logos using recall (drawing) and recognition tasks (Study 1) or a naming task (Study 2). The results showed that memory accur...
Algorithms have become ubiquitous in our day-to-day activities. Their presence ranges from low-stakes decisions such as what music we should listen to, to high-stakes decisions regarding promotion decisions. Despite the frequency and range with which we interact with algorithms, academic research, as well as public outcries, suggest that humans oft...
In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet pro...
To investigate whether local elements are grouped into global shapes in the absence of awareness, we introduced two different masked priming designs (e.g., the classic dissociation paradigm and a trial-wise probe and prime discrimination task) and collected both objective (i.e., performance based) and subjective (using the perceptual awareness scal...
Exposure to natural environments has shown to have a positive influence on executive mental functioning. In the
present study, we investigated whether these nature-related cognitive benefits can extend to visuospatial
working memory (WM), a cognitive function relatively underexplored on this topic. Participants performed a
Change Localization task...
In the present study, we will introduce a novel masked priming design comprising both objective (i.e., performance based) and subjective (i.e., visibility reports, gathered through the perceptual awareness scale; PAS) awareness measures to study whether local elements are grouped into global (square and diamond) shapes in the absence of awareness....
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...
Following theories of emotional embodiment, the facial feedback hypothesis suggests that individuals’ subjective experiences of emotion are influenced by their facial expressions. However, evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We thus formed a global adversarial collaboration and carried out a preregistered, multicentre study designed to spe...
Background: Mannheim Dream Questionnaire (MADRE) is an instrument used to retrospectively measure various aspects of dreams. The current study has two objectives: First, to provide a reliable Spanish validation of the Mannheim Dream (MADRE) questionnaire related to the study of dreams, and second, to compare the actual recall frequencies with those...
In the context of urban life, some monuments are ecologically relevant landmarks for some people. However, previous research on the topic of incidental memory of everyday settings has relatively ignored how people remember monuments from their environments. The present work examined visual memory (i.e., recall and recognition) and metamemory for th...
Visuospatial processing is key to achieve optimal performance in academic activities, among others. In the field of spatial cognition, it has been found that practice with spatial tasks can reduce the gender gap in this type of reasoning. However, an increase in spatial scores does not always compensate the differences that exist between participan...
El procesamiento visoespacial es clave para lograr, entre otros, un rendimiento óptimo en actividades académicas. En el ámbito de la cognición espacial se ha encontrado que la práctica con tareas espaciales puede reducir la brecha de género en este tipo de razonamiento. Sin embargo, no siempre un aumento de las puntuaciones espaciales llega a compe...
The level of processing hypothesis (LoP) proposes that the transition from unaware to aware visual perception is graded for low-level (i.e., energy, features) stimulus whereas dichotomous for high-level (i.e., letters, words, meaning) stimulus. In this study, we explore the behavioral patterns and neural correlates associated with different depths...
The main objective of this study was to evaluate whether the number of nocturnal awakenings influences the frequency of dream recall in a sample of 58 healthy young adults. In addition, the influence of other factors (i.e., anxiety trait, vividness of mental images, spatial visualization) over the level of clarity of dream memories was examined.
The integration between Gestalt grouping cues has been a relatively unexplored issue in vision science. The present work introduces an objective indirect method based on the repetition discrimination task to determine the rules that govern the dominance dynamics of the competition between both intrinsic (Experiment 1: proximity vs. luminance simila...
Does a visual percept emerge to consciousness in a graded manner (i.e. evolving through increasing degrees of clarity), or according to a dichotomous, “all-or-none” pattern (i.e. abruptly transitioning from unawareness to awareness)? The level of processing hypothesis (LoP; B. Windey and A. Cleeremans, 2015) recently proposed a theoretical framewor...
Previous studies on metacognitive performance have explored children's abilities during primary school (7-11 years) in abstract and mathematical reasoning tasks. However, there have been no studies evaluating the metamemory processes with spatial tasks in primary school children, and even more generally, only a few studies have explored spatial met...
In two experiments, we explored the nature of the bias observed in the bat/ball problem of the cognitive reflection test (Frederick, 2005, J. Econ. Perspect., 19, 25), how to override it, and its relation to executive functioning. Based on the original bat/ball problem, we designed two additional isomorphic items. In Experiment 1, for four age grou...
The level of processing (LoP) hypothesis proposes that low-level stimulus perception (i.e., stimulus energy and features) is a graded process whereas high-level (i.e., letters, words, meaning) stimulus perception is all-or-none. In the present study, we set up a visual masking design in order to examine the nature of visual awareness at stimulus en...
Several studies have shown that spatial skills can be improved and are linked to mathematical reasoning. However, there are few studies that have evaluated the effect of Mental Rotation (MR) training on mathematical performance in children aged 6–8 years. One of the studies has shown a transfer towards a mathematical task, while the other has faile...
Perceptual grouping operations are crucial for visual object recognition. From the pioneering proposal of Gestalt psychologists, research has focused mostly on the dynamics of single grouping laws. However, the integration between grouping cues has received relatively less attention. The present event-related potentials (ERPs) study aimed to examin...
A crucial view in the graded vs. dichotomous debate on visual awareness proposes that its graded or dichotomous nature may depend on the depth of stimulus processing (or level of processing) associated to the experimental task. In the present study, we explored the behavioral patterns and neural correlates of different degrees of awareness associat...
In the present study, we conducted two experiments (Experiment 1: 35 participants, M = 29; SD = 8.4; Experiment 2: 36 participants, M = 25; SD = 6.1) with the intention to explore whether underlying perceptual grouping operations and illusory form perception generate dissociable priming effects when Kanizsa-like figures are presented as primes and...
Previous research on perceptual organization operations still provides contradictory evidence on whether the integration of sparse local elements into coherently unified shapes and the construction of the illusory form are accomplished without the need of awareness. In the present study, three experiments were conducted in which participants were p...
The competition between perceptual grouping factors is a relatively ignored topic, especially in the case of extrinsic grouping cues (e.g., common region or connectedness). Recent studies have examined the integration of extrinsic cues using tasks that induce selective attention to groups based on different grouping cues. However, this procedure co...
Background/aims:
Category fluency tasks have been widely used to assess cognitive functioning in both clinical and experimental environments as an index of cognitive and psycholinguistic dysfunctions in dementia. Typically, a reduced group of semantic categories has been selected for neuropsychological assessment (e.g., animals, fruits or vegetabl...
This study adapted a new task to assess visuospatial and verbal working memory impairments in patients with Alzheimer Disease (AD), including an executive strategy of information suppression. The aim was to examine the visuospatial and verbal difficulties, and additionally to explore the average sex differences, during a 2-year follow-up study. The...
In the present study we examined the dominance dynamics of perceptual grouping cues. We used a paradigm in which participants selectively attended to perceptual groups based on several grouping cues in different blocks of trials. In each block, single and competing grouping cues were presented under different exposure durations (50, 150 or 350ms)....
The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity,
subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish
words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be
downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s...
Our main objective was to analyse the different contributions of relational verbal reasoning (analogical and class inclusion) and executive functioning to metaphor comprehension across development. We postulated that both relational reasoning and executive functioning should predict individual and developmental differences. However, executive funct...
Updating information in working memory (WM) is a critical executive function responsible both for continuously replacing outdated information with new relevant data and to suppress or inhibit content that is no longer relevant according to task demands. The goal of the present research is twofold: First, we aimed to study updating development in 54...
From the field of embodied cognition, previous studies have reported evidence of metaphorical mapping of emotion concepts onto a vertical spatial axis. Most of the work on this topic has used visual words as the typical experimental stimuli. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined the association between affect and vertical space...
This study examines the influence of the relative strength of grouping principles on interactions between the intrinsic principle of proximity and the extrinsic principle of common region in the process of perceptual organization. Cooperation and competition between intrinsic and extrinsic principles were examined by presenting the principle either...
Previous studies on the visual processing of hierarchical stimuli showed that responses to targets presented either in the local or in the global level were faster when the target was presented at the same hierar-chical level as the previous trial (sequential priming effect). In the present work, a new attentional priming paradigm was developed in...
In the present study, we introduce affective norms for a new set of Spanish words, the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS), that were scored on two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and on five discrete emotional categories (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust), as well as on concreteness, by 660 Spanish native speakers....
Principles of perceptual grouping can be divided into intrinsic grouping cues, which are based on built-in properties of the grouped elements (e.g., their shape, position, colour, etc.) like most of the classical Gestalt laws, and extrinsic grouping principles, based on relations between the discrete elements and other external stimuli that induce...
In the present study, we examined the interactions between in-trinsic (proximity and similarity) and extrinsic (common region) grouping principles. In three experiments, each principle was displayed alone or con-joined with another principle both in a competitive or cooperating way. When common region and similarity principles were used (Experiment...
Several experimental studies have shown that there exists an association between emotion words and the vertical spatial axis. However, the specific conditions under which this conceptual-physical interaction emerges are still unknown, and no study has been devised to test whether longer linguistic units than words can lead to a mapping of emotions...
Previous studies making use of indirect processing measures have shown that perceptual grouping can occur outside the focus of attention. However, no previous study has examined the possibility of subliminal processing of perceptual grouping. The present work steps forward in the study of perceptual organization, reporting direct evidence of sublim...
This article presents a new corpus of 820 words pertaining to 14 semantic categories, 7 natural (animals, body parts, insects, flowers, fruits, trees, and vegetables) and 7 man-made (buildings, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, musical instruments, tools, and vehicles); each word in the database was collected empirically in a previous exemplar...
The Attention Networks Test (ANT) has been widely used to assess the three attentional networks proposed by Posner and his collaborators. Here we present a version of the ANT that uses emotionally laden words as cues to evaluate the functioning of the attention networks and their interactions. University students participated in the task and the re...
This work presents a new set of 360 high quality colour images belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Two hundred and thirty-six Spanish speakers named the items and also provided data from seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we a...
Colour photographs of the 360 items.
(RAR)
Indexes of individual item analysis including a measure of item difficulty and two indexes of item discrimination based on item-test correlations (point-biserial and biserial).
(DOC)
Normative psycholinguistic ratings for each item.
(DOC)
Proportion (in brackets) of target names, alternative names, acceptable synonyms of each item, plus “Don't know” (DK), “Don't remember” (DR), and “Tip of the tongue” (TOT) responses.
(DOC)
The interactions between intrinsic grouping principles (by proximity or by similarity in shape or luminance) and extrinsic grouping by common region were examined by presenting both principles acting alone or conjoined with another principle in visual patterns. The procedure used in our study closely mirrored that of Quinlan and Wilton (1998 Percep...
We examined the effects of different grouping cues (item density, number and connectedness) on the ability of a patient with simultanagnosia (GK) to identify compound stimuli. In Experiment 1, the effects of density and connectedness on the recognition of global and local forms were examined. In Experiment 2, the spatial distance of local elements...
This paper presents a new corpus of 140 high quality colour images belonging to 14 subcategories and covering a range of naming difficulty. One hundred and six Spanish speakers named the items and provided data for several psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity....
Background: The potential differential impact of Alzheimer's disease (AD) across semantic categories/domains (i.e., living/nonliving) has been debated extensively in the past 30 years. An important methodological consideration in this area is the issue of whether category effects are genuine or a by-product of intrinsic properties of items, i.e., n...
Previous studies on the processing of hierarchical patterns (Luna & Montoro, 200830.
Luna , D. and
Montoro , P. R. 2008. The distortion of spatial relationships between local elements in hierarchical patterns decreases the global advantage effect. Psychological Research, 72: 168–175. [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®]View all references) ha...
In a typical flanker task, responses to a central target ("S" or "N") are modulated by whether the flankers are compatible ("SSSSS") or incompatible ("NNSNN"), with increased reaction times and decreased accuracy on incompatible trials. The role of the motor system in response interference under these conditions remains unclear, however. Here we sh...
The present study examined the influence of perceptual organization on the processing of global and local information in hierarchical patterns. In two experiments, we examined whether disturbing the spatial relationships between local elements by introducing between-element distance and size heterogeneity affected global processing dominance. The e...
Este trabajo es un estudio preliminar que pretende analizar el efecto que tiene el tiempo de exposición de la información sobre la robustez del Efecto de Compatibilidad de los Flancos (ECF). Para ello, hemos llevado a cabo un experimento en el que hemos manipulado tres tiempos de exposición (14 ms, 157 ms y hasta respuesta) bajo diferentes condicio...