The aim of the research is to study the capacity for self-evaluation of 271 primary school student undergoing tests involving mathematics and formal reasoning. Subjects were asked to estimate the number of correct answers and subsequently to compare their performance with that of their peers. The results demonstrate that all the subjects in all tests showed a significant negative relationship among real score and self - evaluation indices. Analyzing comparative assessments, the results reported in literature by Kruger and Dunning were confirmed: poor performers tend to significantly overestimate their own performance whilst top performers tend to underestimate it. This can be interpreted as a demonstration that the accuracy of comparative self-evaluations depends on a number of variables: cognitive and metacognitive factors and aspects associated with self-representation. To verify these aspects we examined bias in self evaluation from an attributional perspective too. Our conclusion is that cognitive and metacognitive processes work as “submerged” in highly subjective representations, allowing dynamics related to safeguarding the image one has of oneself to play a role.

The objective of the current thesis is to investigate the temporal dynamics (i.e., time courses) of the Simon effect, both from a theoretical and experimental point of view, for a better understanding of whether a) one or more process are responsible for the Simon effect and b) how this/these mechanism/s differently influence performance. In the first theoretical (i.e., “Theoretical Overview”) part, I examined in detail the process and justification for analyzing the temporal dynamics of the Simon effect and the assumptions that underlie interpretation of the results which have been obtained in the existing literature so far. In the second part (“Experimental Investigations”), though, I experimentally investigated several issues which the existing literature left unsolved, in order to get further evidence in favor or in contrast with the mainstream models which are currently used to account for the different Simon effect time courses. Some points about the experiments are worth mentioning: First, all the experiments were conducted in the laboratory, facing participants with stimuli presented on a PC screen and then recording their responses. Both stimuli presentation and response collection was controlled by the E-Prime software. The dependent variables of interest were always behavioral measures of performance, such as velocity and accuracy. Second, the most part of my experiments had been conducted at the Communication Sciences Department (University of Bologna), under Prof. Nicoletti’s supervision. The remaining part, though, had been conducted at the Psychological Sciences Department of Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA), where I collaborated for one year as a visiting student with Prof. Proctor and his team. Third, my experimental pool was entirely composed by healthy and young students, since the cognitive functioning of elderly people was not the target of my research.

L’oggetto della nostra ricerca è l’opinione pubblica e il comportamento dell’elettore in una prospettiva comparata. L’obiettivo della ricerca è stato analizzare la relevanza degli approcci psicologici per una migliore comprensiore della partecipazione politica, delle opinioni e delle scelte elettorali degli studenti Italiani e Bielorussi. Nella parte teorica, noi discutiamo i modelli dell'approccio cognitivo al comportamento di voto. Discutiamo inoltre il concetto dello stile cognitivo e le sue cinque categorie: stile sintetico, idealistico, pragmatico, analitico o realistico, come descritti da A.Harrison and R.M. Branson e adattati da A. Alexeev and L. Gromova. Nonostante il fatto che la ricerca tratta il caso degli studenti, noi crediamo che i risultati siano pertinenti per un’ulteriore ricerca dell’auditorio più vasto e variegato. / The object of our research is public opinion and voting behaviour, which we analyze in the comparative prospective. The aim of the research is to consider the relevance of psycho-political approach for a better understanding of political participation, public opinion and electoral choices of Italian and Belarusian students. In the theoreticasl part of this work, we deal with the main models of the cognitive approachto the study of political behavior. We also discuss the concept of cognitive styles, and their measurement by the questionnaire of A. Harrison and R. Branson, as modified by A. Alexeev and L. Gromova. Despite the fact that the research has dealt with the student audience only, we believe that its findings are extandable to larger audiences.

L’obiettivo del presente progetto di ricerca era determinare se l’utilizzo non clinico del simulatore d’alba (un dispositivo che emette luce in graduale aumento prima del risveglio), basato su specifiche conoscenze cronobiologiche, potesse ridurre alcune delle conseguenze del social jetlag, in studenti di scuola secondaria di secondo grado. A tal fine, sono stati valutati gli effetti del simulatore d’alba su tono dell’umore (valutato soggettivamente tramite la Global and Vigor Affect Scale-GVA), livelli di attivazione (valutati soggettivamente tramite la GVA), qualità/quantità di sonno (valutate oggettivamente e soggettivamente tramite attigrafia e Mini Sleep Questionnaire-MSQ), architettura del sonno (valutata oggettivamente tramite Zeo®) ed efficienza dei tre network attentivi (alerting, orienting ed executive), valutata oggettivamente tramite l’Attention Network Test (ANT). In totale, hanno preso parte alla ricerca 56 adolescenti (24 femmine e 32 maschi), frequentanti due istituti di scuola secondaria di secondo grado nella città di Cesena, la cui età media era di 17.68 anni (range d’età 15-20 anni). Ad ogni studente è stata richiesta una partecipazione di 5 settimane consecutive ed il disegno di ricerca prevedeva 3 condizioni sperimentali: baseline, simulatore d’alba e controllo. All’MSQ, in seguito all’utilizzo del simulatore d’alba, sono state osservate una minore percezione di sonnolenza diurna, una frequenza inferiore di risvegli notturni ed una riduzione del numero di partecipanti che presentavano una cattiva qualità della veglia. All’ANT, è stato documentato un significativo miglioramento dell’efficienza del network attentivo dell’alerting, successivo all’impiego del simulatore d’alba, dovuto ad una maggiore reattività dei partecipanti in seguito alla comparsa del double cue, che anticipava la presentazione del target (freccia centrale di cui i partecipanti dovevano giudicare la direzione). Tali risultati convergono nell’evidenziare la capacità del simulatore d’alba di esercitare un effetto attivante/stimolante, mostrando dunque come esso possa essere considerato uno strumento potenzialmente utilizzabile quale contromisura al social jetlag in adolescenza. / The main goal of the present research project was to verify if the non-clinical use of the dawn simulator (i.e., a lamp that emits light that gradually increases before the morning awakening), based on a specific chronobiological knowledge, could reduce some of the social jetlag’s consequences in high school students. To this end, the effects of dawn simulator have been assessed on the following features: mood and activation (assessed subjectively through the Global Vigor and Affect Scale-GVA), quality and quantity of sleep (assessed both objectively and subjectively through actigraphy and Mini Sleep Questionnaire-MSQ, respectively), sleep architecture (assessed objectively through Zeo®), and efficiency of the three attentional networks (alerting, orienting and executive) assessed through the Attention Network Test (ANT). On the whole, 56 adolescents (24 females and 32 males) took part to the study and their mean age was 17.68 years (age ranging between 15 and 20 years); they were attending two high schools in the city of Cesena (Emilia-Romagna, Italy). Each adolescent was requested to participate for five consecutive weeks and the research design included the following three experimental conditions: baseline, dawn simulator and control. As regards the MSQ, after the use of dawn simulator, it was observed a lower perception of diurnal sleepiness, less nighttime awakenings and a lower number of participants with a bad wake quality. At the ANT, the efficiency of the alerting network improved subsequent to the use of dawn simulator, because participants were more alerted after the appearance of the double cue, that preceded the target (i.e., a centrally presented arrow of which participants had to identify the direction). Overall the present results show that the dawn simulator is able to determine an activating/alerting effect and thus it may be considered like a tool potentially usable as a countermeasure for social jetlag in adolescence.

The perspective of the present project can be inscribed in the so-called “Social Cognition” framework, that in the last years moved from a focus on the individual mind toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Among the topics relevant for social cognition, the aim of the thesis was to shed more light on motor resonance and joint action, by using two well-known effects of cognitive psychology: “Affordance” and “Simon”. In the first part of the project, the Affordance effect has been considered, starting from Gibson to some post-Gibsonian theorizations. Particular attention has received the notion of “Micro-affordance”. The theoretical and empirical overview allows to understand how it can be possible to use the affordance effect to investigate the issue of motor resonance. A first study employed a priming paradigm and explored both in adults and school-age children the influence of a micro-affordance that can be defined dangerousness, and how motor resonance develops. The second part of the thesis focused on the Simon effect, starting with the presentation of the “stimulus–response (S–R) compatibility effect” to introduce the “Simon effect”. Particular attention has been dedicated to recent studies on the “joint Simon effect”. The reviewed empirical findings have been discussed in a wider theoretical perspective on joint action. The second study was aimed at investigating whether shared representations, as indexed by the presence of the joint Simon effect, are modulated by minimal ingroup–outgroup distinctions and by experienced interdependence between participants. The third study explored to what extent prior experience could modulate performance in task sharing, combining two paradigms of cognitive psychology, the joint Simon and the joint transfer-of-learning. In a general discussion the results obtained in the three studies have been summarized, emphasizing their original contribution and their importance within the Social Cognition research.

The present thesis addresses several experimental questions regarding the nature of the processes underlying the larger centro-parietal Late Positive Potential (LPP) measured during the viewing of emotional(both pleasant and unpleasant) compared to neutral pictures. During a passive viewing condition, this modulatory difference is significantly reduced with picture repetition, but it does not completely habituate even after a massive repetition of the same picture exemplar. In order to investigate the obligatory nature of the affective modulation of the LPP, in Study 1 we introduced a competing task during repetitive exposure of affective pictures. Picture repetition occurred in a passive viewing context or during a categorization task, in which pictures depicting any mean of transportation were presented as targets, and repeated pictures (affectively engaging images) served as distractor stimuli. Results indicated that the impact of repetition on the LPP affective modulation was very similar between the passive and the task contexts, indicating that the affective processing of visual stimuli reflects an obligatory process that occurs despite participants were engaged in a categorization task. In study 2 we assessed whether the decrease of the LPP affective modulation persists over time, by presenting in day 2 the same set of pictures that were massively repeated in day 1. Results indicated that the reduction of the emotional modulation of the LPP to repeated pictures persisted even after 1-day interval, suggesting a contribution of long-term memory processes on the affective habituation of the LPP. Taken together, the data provide new information regarding the processes underlying the affective modulation of the late positive potential.

This thesis investigated affordances and verbal language to demonstrate the flexibility of embodied simulation processes. Starting from the assumption that both object/action understanding and language comprehension are tied to the context in which they take place, six studies clarified the factors that modulate simulation. The studies in chapter 4 and 5 investigated affordance activation in complex scenes, revealing the strong influence of the visual context, which included either objects and actions, on compatibility effects. The study in chapter 6 compared the simulation triggered by visual objects and objects names, showing differences depending on the kind of materials processed. The study in chapter 7 tested the predictions of the WAT theory, confirming that the different contexts in which words are acquired lead to the difference typically observed in the literature between concrete and abstract words. The study in chapter 8 on the grounding of abstract concepts tested the mapping of temporal contents on the spatial frame of reference of the mental timeline, showing that metaphoric congruency effects are not automatic, but flexibly mediated by the context determined by the goals of different tasks. The study in chapter 9 investigated the role of iconicity in verbal language, showing sound-to-shape correspondences when every-day object figures, result that validated the reality of sound-symbolism in ecological contexts. On the whole, this evidence favors embodied views of cognition, and supports the hypothesis of a high flexibility of simulation processes. The reported conceptual effects confirm that the context plays a crucial role in affordances emergence, metaphoric mappings activation and language grounding. In conclusion, this thesis highlights that in an embodied perspective cognition is necessarily situated and anchored to a specific context, as it is sustained by the existence of a specific body immersed in a specific environment.

This research deals with some perceptual aspects of shape and colour vision, and specifically with the relation between the widespread phenomenon of amodality in vision and the multifarious characteristics of colour appearances. The study is divided into a theoretical and an experimental part, and the rationale of the two experiments is discussed within the systematic framework illustrated in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, respectively on the topics of colour and amodality. The third chapter describes an experiment carried out in order to study the effects of colour in dimensional phenomena. The results show that colour has an effect on amodal completion, and particularly regarding dark/light colours and harmonic and disharmonic configurations. The fourth chapter describes an experiment carried out in order to test the existence of a perceived natural relationship between shape and colour using non-geometrical figures. The aim of this study was to verify whether there is a natural relation between colours and natural shapes, and which elements or parts of the shapes – like orientation, type of shape, margins, texture or dimensionality – might be responsible for that relation and explain it. The results confirmed the initial hypothesis. Overall, one of the best achievements of the research reported, has been its demonstration of the feasibility of the phenomenological methods, complementary to psychophysical methods in the scientific analysis of visual perception.

In the last decade, a consistent body of research has shown that the correct identification of task-relevant items can cause a transitory increase in human perceptual sensitivity. In the present work I report evidence of short- and long-term changes in perceptual processing triggered by the recognition of visual targets. This collection of studies suggests that targets recognition may trigger internal signals of reinforcement which, in turn, would foster cortical plasticity. Interestingly, such endogenous signals seem to be modulated by the presence of external reward and by intrinsic aspects of task performance.

In everyday life, our body gets in contact with multiple tactile stimuli from the outside world. How our somatosensory system identifies and localises these multiple stimuli entering in contact with our body surface, is the general framework to which the researches of the present thesis belong. Tactile stimuli on our body can be spatially coded and represented by using multiple reference frames. Touch is initially encoded into a sensory-space within primary somatosensory map and then further stages of processing can represent the location of tactile event with respect to the overall body structure (body-space) or to the outside world (external-space). In the present thesis we report first a series of behavioural experiments aimed at investigating which spatial reference frame is adopted in a special context of sensory stimulation, namely the double simultaneous stimulation (DSS). Then, we used functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) as a tool for delineating the neural bases of the cognitive processes sub-serving the elaboration and representation of concurrent stimuli for conscious tactile perception. In a first behavioural study using the tactile DSS paradigm, we defined the spatial coding used by observers when tactile stimuli are delivered with different fingers combinations (i.e., within vs. between hands) and hand postures (i.e., hands palm-down vs. palm-up). In a second behavioural work we tested the influence of different visual modulations (e.g., seeing body parts or objects) and visual-proprioceptive conflict (e.g., seeing body parts in a different position with respect to one adopted by the participant) on the spatial representation of touch. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of changes to the visual structural morphology of a body part on the spatial representation of touch. Finally, using a fMRI adaptation paradigm for touches at the fingers, we aimed to define the neural bases of tactile perception in a repeated stimulations context. In particular, we assessed the mutual interaction between tactile stimuli located at body parts that are clearly distinct in terms of the body-space (e.g., left and right index fingers), but proximal in terms of neural representations (due to some bilateral responses of the somatosensory cortices).