Roberto A. Ferreira

• PhD in Psychology
• Research Director at Millennium Nucleus for the Science of Learning

We investigated the neural basis of newly learned words in Spanish as a mother tongue (L1) and English as a second language (L2). Participants acquired new names for real but unfamiliar concepts in both languages over the course of two days. On day 3, they completed a semantic categorization task during fMRI scanning. The results revealed largely o...

Misconceptions about the brain (neuromyths) among educators have been found across different countries, but little has been done to dispel them. The present study assessed the effect of a one-year Science of Learning (SoL) course on neuroscience literacy and beliefs in neuromyths in a sample of Chilean pre-service teachers. An experimental group of...

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and...

Idioms are frequently used by native speakers but pose challenges for L2 learners. In this study,we aimed to identify the key psycholinguistic properties that predict L2 idiom knowledge amongnon-immersed speakers. A total of 53 Chilean L2 English speakers participated in an online idiomknowledge test, requiring them to recognize the figurative mean...

The effect of emotional valence in word retrieval is well‐established in native languages, but findings in a foreign language remain inconsistent. This study investigated the impact of emotional valence on free word recall in English as a foreign language after video exposure. Participants were upper‐intermediate English speakers with Spanish as th...

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and...

Organic chemistry is one of the most feared and failed courses due to its complex and fast-paced nature. Investigating affective metrics that relate to achievement in these courses can be worthwhile, particularly when these metrics show predictive relationships to achievement. Attitude toward chemistry has been investigated utilizing a variety of i...

Introduction Number sense has been systematically measured using dot comparison tasks. However, recent studies have reported that performance on dot comparison might be influenced inhibitory control and visual properties of dot arrays. In the present study, we analysed the influence of continuous magnitude, inhibitory control, and numerical ratio o...

A negative correlation between mathematics performance and mathematics anxiety (MA) has been identified in students of varying ages. However, little is known as to whether this correlation diminishes when environmental factors are incorporated as moderator variables. Specifically, the effect of home numeracy activities (HNA) and parental MA on stud...

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and...

Attitudes towards learning chemistry have been little studied in secondary school students, especially regarding dimensions related to problem solving, the molecular atomic perspective of chemistry, and real-world connection of chemistry. In the present study, we first aimed to design and assess the psychometric properties of the attitude to learni...

En esta investigación se indagó acerca de las actitudes hacia la química de 444 estudiantes de secundaria chilenos, empleando un método mixto de diseño secuencial explicativo. Los resultados descriptivos revelaron actitudes relativamente bajas en las dos dimensiones analizadas, cognitiva y afectiva, aunque levemente superiores en la última. Los res...

The present study investigated the effect of emotional valence on auditory word recognition memory in English as a foreign language. Participants included 48 native Spanish speakers whose foreign language was English. They viewed four emotionally negative, four positive, and four neutral videos that, in total, contained 48 emotionally valenced targ...

Mathematics anxiety (MA) has primarily been studied in adults and children over 8 years of age in English-speaking countries. Few studies have examined MA in younger children and in Spanish-speaking contexts due to the lack of suitable instruments. In the present study we examine the psychometric properties of the Child Mathematics Anxiety Question...

Socio-economic status (SES) and mathematical performance seem to be risk factors of mathematics anxiety (MA) in both children and adults. However, there is little evidence about how exactly these three constructs are related, especially during early stages of mathematical learning. In the present study, we assessed longitudinal performance in symbo...

Lexical availability measures the degree of availability of a word given a semantic context or category. It has been widely used in the Spanish-speaking world in order to derive words for use in dictionaries and/or teaching materials, but has received very little attention in English. The aim of this research was to identify the predictors of lexic...

It is well-known that teacher expectations tend to be biased by factors such as student socio-economic status (SES) and gender. However, much less research has been devoted to understanding how teacher characteristics may impact their own expectations of the students. The present study investigated teacher expectations for 343 Chilean teachers (240...

The benefit of testing on the retention of verbal materials has been studied quite extensively, however very little attention has been put on establishing when the best time to actually apply a test is. The present study investigated the effect of testing (immediate and delayed) on the learning of novel words in English as a foreign language (E...

The benefit of testing on the retention of verbal materials has been studied quite extensively, however very little attention has been put on establishing when the best time to actually apply a test is. The present study investigated the effect of testing (immediate and delayed) on the learning of novel words in English as a foreign language (EFL)....

Existe un marcado interés de parte de los profesores por adquirir conocimientos en neurociencia, e incluso a menudo se exalta la relevancia de esta disciplina para la educación. Sin embargo, hoy en día la formación inicial docente en Chile no contempla asignaturas que ofrezcan contenidos de neurociencia. En su afán por aprender sobre esta disciplin...

The present study examined the contribution of working memory and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) to growth trajectories in number processing, measured using Curriculum-based Measurement (CBM). Participants were two groups of first grade children; one group were at risk of developing mathematics disabilities (MLD-at-risk, n = 32), and the other incl...

The present study examined the contribution of working memory and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) to growth trajectories in number processing, measured using Curriculum-based Measurement (CBM). Participants were two groups of first grade children; one group were at risk of developing mathematics disabilities (MLD-at-risk, n = 32), and the other incl...

Research into attitudes towards chemistry in Latin America and indeed towards science in general, is very limited. The present study aimed to adapt and validate a shortened version of Bauer’s Attitude toward the Subject of Chemistry Inventory version 2 (ASCIv2) for use in a Latin American context. It also explored attitudes towards chemistry of Chi...

En el último tiempo ha habido un creciente interés en la neurociencia, principalmente gracias a los importantes avances en las técnicas de neuroimagen, que han permitido observar el funcionamiento del cerebro en tiempo real. La información que se ha obtenido con estas nuevas tecnologías es de gran utilidad para la enseñanza de diferentes disciplina...

RESUMEN El presente estudio investigó la prevalencia de neuromitos y el conocimiento general de neurociencia de profesores chilenos. Se encuestó a 91 profesores de enseñanza básica y media de diferentes establecimientos. En línea con las investigaciones previas, los resultados demostraron que los profesores poseen cierto conocimiento general de...

The present study investigated the prevalence of neuromyths and the general neuroscience knowledge of Chilean teachers. We surveyed 91 teachers working in primary and secondary education at different schools. Consistent with previous research, the results showed that teachers have some general knowledge of neuroscience, but also hold many misconcep...

Si bien se ha confirmado el efecto de las expectativas docentes en el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes, son escasos los estudios centrados en constatar qué variables afectan a la formación de dichas expectativas, en especial aquellos que consideran el rendimiento previo del estudiante y la experiencia laboral del profesor como factores expl...

This experiment investigated contextual diversity effects on novel word learning in English as a second language (L2). A group of advanced English speakers, whose native language was Spanish, participated in the study. Participants learned the meaning of real but obscure words that were embedded in either two or 12 different sentences and learned o...

Lexical availability has been widely used in the Spanish-speaking world for more than two decades. However, only in recent years has there been growing interest in its cognitive aspects. The present article deals with semantic relations of words in lexical availabily tests. A group of advanced EFL students, native speakers of Spanish, and a similar...

El presente estudio experimental investigó los efectos de la lectura incidental (LI) y la lectura acompañada de ejercicios de vocabulario (LEV) en el aprendizaje léxico en inglés como lengua extranjera (L2). Los participantes eran un grupo de 20 alumnos de sexto básico cuyo nivel de inglés correspondía a pre-intermedio. El experimento adoptó un dis...

The current investigation used lexical availability to assess the performance of Chilean university students, advanced English (L2) learners in comparison with English native speakers (L1) in basic (‘Body parts’, ‘Food and drink’), and advanced (‘Terrorism and crime’, ‘Health and medicine’) semantic categories. Three analyses were conducted looking...

This thesis aimed to shed light on the process of word learning and the consequences of storing, retrieving, and using new lexical representations. A number of behavioural experiments and one final fMRI study were conducted. Experiments 1-2 investigated effects of context variability (number of different contexts) and semantic richness (number and...

Lexical availability has been widely used in the Spanish-speaking world for more than two decades. However, only in recent years has there been growing interest in its cognitive aspects. The present article deals with semantic relations of words in lexical availabily tests. A group of advanced EFL students, native speakers of Spanish, and a similar...

Reading familiar words differs from reading unfamiliar non-words in two ways. First, word reading is faster and more accurate than reading of unfamiliar non-words. Second, effects of letter length are reduced for words, particularly when they are presented in the right visual field in familiar formats. Two experiments are reported in which right-ha...

DispoGrafo: una nueva herramienta computacional para el anAlisis de relaciones semanticas en el lexico disponible 1 DispoGrafo. A new computational tool for the analysis of semantic relations in lexical availability RESUMEN Se desarrolló un programa computacional destinado a apoyar el análisis psicolingüístico de los términos elicitados mediante en...

A computer program was developed to support psycholinguistic analyses of words elicited in lexical availability tests. By means of an algorithm based on word sequence relations, our program, DispoGrafo, inputs elicited words to automatically generate graphs in which nodes represent words and lines the links between them. Graphs are then interpreted...