CITIAPS

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they could be ironical, literal or nonsensical endings. Participants were asked to evaluate whether each sentence was coherent or incoherent. Half of them were initially instructed to consider whether the sentences made sense (holistic condition); the other half were instructed to consider whether the sentences were congruent or incongruent (analytic condition). Behavioral responses and Event Related Potentials were registered during the experiment. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results allow clearly distinguishing between the holistic and the analytic strategies. The fact that the same set of stimuli elicits different ERP waveforms, depending on the strategy with which they are analyzed, suggests that different cognitive processes and different areas of the brain are operating in each case.

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaphorical expressions and producing bodily gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the metaphorical meaning of such expressions. This modality of stimuli presentation allows a more ecological approach to meaning integration. When ERPs were calculated using gesture stroke as time-lock event, gesture incongruity with metaphorical expression modulated the amplitude of the N400 and of the late positive complex (LPC). This suggests that gestural and speech information are combined online to make sense of the interlocutor's linguistic production in an early stage of metaphor comprehension. Our data favor the idea that meaning construction is globally integrative and highly context-sensitive.

This paper reports a survey (N = 1,465) conducted in Chile that was conceived to understand the role of coalition identification as an important sociopsychological mechanism for promoting positive affects toward own-coalition party members in a multiparty system, above and beyond interparty political differences. Participants judged their own political party, parties within coalitions (fellow coalition members and opposing parties), and

Microgenetic methodologies developed in the firsthalf of the twentieth century are still used in some perception studies. However, contemporary microgenetic studies do not always share the original theoretical background that originated concept definition. Particularly, the phenomenological background of concept has been neglected. This paper shows an ideographic study that aims understanding the perception of emotional faces phenomenon from a microgenetic point of view. We recorded the response of participants viewing pictures of faces exposed for a very brief time. We observed that persons feel emotional tension when they don't know exactly what is in the picture. This emotional tension motivated participants to construct a more stable meaning of the forming percept. Additionally, we observed two types of answers, suggesting two perceptual experiences. One answer was preconceptual, descriptive and restricted to image details, presenting different verbalizations and corporal actions with the second, where the subjects inferred upon what they saw from the images.

I. Introducción. ¿Es la mente el cerebro? ¿Dónde están los pensamientos y los significados? ¿Existen en el contexto intersubjetivo, en algún sitio particular del cerebro, en un ensamble de descargas sincrónicas temporales? ¿Es la psicología un saber naive acerca del cerebro? ¿Es una disciplina autónoma con niveles conceptuales propios, o es reducible a la neurofisiología? ¿Cómo entender el comportamiento humano, a nivel social, individual, o simplemente cerebral? ¿Son compatibles las relaciones entre psicología y neurología?