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Existe una alta prevalencia de creencias pseudocientíficas en nuestro contexto social, lo cual influye negativamente en ámbitos de gran relevancia como la medicina o la educación. La ilusión causal es el sesgo cognitivo que se ha propuesto como posible base del desarrollo de este tipo de creencias injustificadas. En un estudio reciente de nuestro laboratorio hemos observado que las personas que presentan creencias pseudocientíficas más firmes también muestran mayor tendencia a desarrollar ilusiones causales en tareas de aprendizaje de contingencias, respaldando la idea de que las ilusiones causales podrían ser un factor clave para el desarrollo de creencias pseudocientíficas.

Ideally, decisions regarding one's health should be made after assessing the objective probabilities of relevant outcomes. Nevertheless, previous beliefs and emotional reactions also have a role in decision-making. Furthermore, the comprehension of probabilities is commonly affected by the presentation format, and by numeracy. This study aimed to assess the extent to which the influence of these factors might vary between different medical conditions. A sample of university students were presented with two health scenarios containing statistical information on the prevalence of breast cancer and hypertension either through icon arrays (N = 71) or natural frequencies (N = 72). They also received information regarding a preventive measure (mammogram/low-sodium diet) and the likelihood of a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet either when suffering or not suffering from the disease. Before seeing the data, participants rated the severity of the disease and the inconvenience of the preventive measure. After reading the health scenario, participants had to rate its difficulty, and how worrisome it was. They had also to rate the prior probability of suffering from this medical condition, and the posterior probability of it, provided a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet. Finally, they rated the extent to which they would recommend the preventive measures. All the rates used the same 1 (little)-8 (a great deal) scale. Participants' numeracy was also assessed. The scenarios differed significantly in perceived severity and worry, with the cancer scenario obtaining higher scores. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the recommendations in the two health scenarios depended on different variables. A model taking into consideration severity and worry rates best explained decisions in the cancer scenario; in contrast, in the hypertension scenario the model that best explained the recommendations comprised both the posterior probability estimate and the severity rate. Neither numeracy nor presentation format affected recommendation but both affected difficulty, worrying and probability rates. We conclude that previous perceptions of the severity of a health condition modulate the use of probabilistic information for decision-making. The roles of presentation format and numeracy in enabling patients to understand statistical information are also discussed. Introduction

Podeu consultar dades primàries associades a l'article a: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/114909, Previous research has studied the relationship between political ideology and cognitive biases, such as the tendency of conservatives to form stronger illusory correlations between negative infrequent behaviors and minority groups. We further explored these findings by studying the relation between illusory correlation and moral values. According to the moral foundations theory, liberals and conservatives differ in the relevance they concede to different moral dimensions: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Whereas liberals consistently endorse the Care and Fairness foundations more than the Loyalty, Authority and Purity foundations, conservatives tend to adhere to the five foundations alike. In the present study, a group of participants took part in a standard illusory correlation task in which they were presented with randomly ordered descriptions of either desirable or undesirable behaviors attributed to individuals belonging to numerically different majority and minority groups. Although the proportion of desirable and undesirable behaviors was the same in the two groups, participants attributed a higher frequency of undesirable behaviors to the minority group, thus showing the expected illusory correlation effect. Moreover, this effect was specifically associated to our participants' scores in the Loyalty subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. These results emphasize the role of the Loyalty moral foundation in the formation of attitudes towards minorities among conservatives. Our study points out the moral system as a useful fine-grained framework to explore the complex interaction between basic cognitive processes and ideology.

Background Children with a diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) present impaired oral comprehension. According to the simple view of reading, general amodal linguistic capacity accounts for both oral and reading comprehension. Considering this, we should expect SLI children to display a reading comprehension deficit. However, previous research regarding the association between reading disorders and SLI has yielded inconsistent results. Aims To study the influence of prior oral comprehension competence over reading comprehension during the first years of reading acquisition of bilingual Catalan-Spanish children with SLI (ages 7-8). Methods & Procedures We assessed groups of bilingual Catalan-Spanish SLI and matched control children at ages 7 and 8 with standardized reading comprehension tasks including grammatical structures, sentence and text comprehension. Early oral competence and prior non‐verbal intelligence were also measured and introduced into regression analyses with the participants' reading results in order to state the relation between the comprehension of oral and written material. Outcomes & Results Although we found no significant differences between the scores of our two participant groups in the reading tasks, data regarding their early oral competence, but not non‐verbal intelligence measures, significantly influence their reading outcome. Conclusions & Implications The results extend our knowledge regarding the course of literacy acquisition of children with SLI and provide evidence in support of the theories that assume common linguistic processes to be responsible for both oral and reading comprehension.