Pedro Cobos | Universidad de Málaga (original) (raw)

Papers by Pedro Cobos

PLOS ONE

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) is thought to lead to maladaptive behaviours and dysfunctional de... more Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) is thought to lead to maladaptive behaviours and dysfunctional decision making, both in the clinical and healthy population. The seminal study reported by Luhmann and collaborators in 2011 [1] showed that IU was negatively associated with choosing a delayed, but more probable and valuable, reward over choosing an immediate, but less probable and valuable, reward. These findings have been widely disseminated across the field of personality and individual differences because of their relevance for the understanding of the role of IU in the development and maintenance of anxiety-related disorders. Given their importance it would be desirable to have replications of this study, but none have been carried out so far. The current study has been designed to replicate and extend Luhmann et al.’s results. Our sample will include 266 healthy participants (more than five times the sample size used by Luhmann et al.) to detect with a power of 95% the effect size ...

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

PloS one, 2018

Previous studies have provided evidence that selective attention tends to prioritize the processi... more Previous studies have provided evidence that selective attention tends to prioritize the processing of stimuli that are good predictors of upcoming events over nonpredictive stimuli. Moreover, studies using eye-tracking to measure attention demonstrate that this attentional bias towards predictive stimuli is at least partially under voluntary control and can be flexibly adapted via instruction. Our experiment took a similar approach to these prior studies, manipulating participants' experience of the predictiveness of different stimuli over the course of trial-by-trial training; we then provided explicit verbal instructions regarding stimulus predictiveness that were designed to be either consistent or inconsistent with the previously established learned predictiveness. Critically, we measured the effects of training and instruction on attention to stimuli using a dot probe task, which allowed us to assess rapid shifts of attention (unlike the eye-gaze measures used in previous ...

Clinical Psychological Science

Causal knowledge has been shown to affect diagnostic decisions. It is unclear, however, how causa... more Causal knowledge has been shown to affect diagnostic decisions. It is unclear, however, how causal knowledge affects diagnosis. We hypothesized that it influences intuitive reasoning processes. More precisely, we speculated that people automatically assess the coherence between observed symptoms and an assumed causal model of a disorder, which in turn affects diagnostic classification. Intuitive causal reasoning was investigated in an experimental study. Participants were asked to read clinical reports before deciding on a diagnosis. Intuitive processing was studied by analyzing reading times. It turned out that reading times were slower when causally expected consequences of present symptoms were missing or effects of absent causes were present. This causal incoherence effect was predictive of participants’ later explicit diagnostic judgments. These and related findings suggest that diagnostic judgments rely on automatic reasoning processes based on the computation of causal cohere...

Memory & cognition, Aug 12, 2017

The effect of retroactive interference between cues predicting the same outcome (RIBC) occurs whe... more The effect of retroactive interference between cues predicting the same outcome (RIBC) occurs when the behavioral expression of a cue-outcome association (e.g., A→O1) is reduced due to the later acquisition of an association between a different cue and the same outcome (e.g., B→O1). In the present experimental series, we show that this effect can be modulated by knowledge concerning the structure of these cue-outcome relationships. In Experiments 1A and 1B, a pretraining phase was included to promote the expectation of either a one-to-one (OtO) or a many-to-one (MtO) cue-outcome structure during the subsequent RIBC training phases. We hypothesized that the adoption of an OtO expectation would make participants infer that the previously learned A→O1 relationship would not hold any longer after the exposure to B→O1 trials. Alternatively, the adoption of an MtO expectation would prevent participants from making such an inference. Experiment 1B included an additional condition without p...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2016

In our study, we tested the hypothesis that feature-based and rule-based generalization involve d... more In our study, we tested the hypothesis that feature-based and rule-based generalization involve different types of processes that may affect each other producing different results depending on time constraints and on how generalization is measured. For this purpose, participants in our experiments learned cue-outcome relationships that followed the opposites rule: Single cues that signaled the same outcome (e.g., A-1/B-1) predicted the opposite outcome when presented in compound (e.g., AB-2). Some cues were only presented in compound during training (e.g., EF-1) to see if at test participants tended to generalize according to rule-based (i.e., E-2/F-2) or according to feature-based generalization (i.e., E-1/F-1). The generalization test used 2 different tasks: a predictive judgment task, and a cued-response priming task. In Experiment 1, participants&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; verbal ratings were consistent with rule-based generalization. However, participants&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; reaction times (RTs) in the cued-response priming task were consistent with feature-based generalization. Experiment 2 replicated the results from Experiment 1, and it also provided evidence consistent with feature-based or rule-based generalization depending on whether a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 200 ms) or a long SOA (1300 ms), respectively, was used in the priming task. Our results are interpreted as supporting the idea that feature-based generalization process relies on fast, associative processes, whereas rule-based generalization is slow and depends on executive control resources. The latter generalization process would inhibit the former when enough time and resources are available. Otherwise, feature-based generalization would take control of responses. (PsycINFO Database Record

Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, 2014

Amanda Flores had a FPI PhD scholarship that was awarded by Junta de Andalucía. We would like to ... more Amanda Flores had a FPI PhD scholarship that was awarded by Junta de Andalucía. We would like to thank to Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Andalucía Oriental, José Díaz Ruiz, and Aurora Gavino Lázaro for their invaluable help to conduct the experiment.

Manual Practico De Psicologia Del Pensamiento 2005 Isbn 978 84 344 2882 9 Pags 13 26, 2005

Psicología del aprendizaje, 2007

Información del artículo Procesos de aprendizaje causal.

J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn, 2003

Three experiments show that understanding of biases in probability judgment can be improved by ex... more Three experiments show that understanding of biases in probability judgment can be improved by extending the application of the associative-learning framework. In Experiment 1, the authors used M. A. Gluck and G. H. Bower's (1988a) diagnostic-learning task to replicate apparent base-rate neglect and to induce the conjunction fallacy in a later judgment phase as a by-product of the conversion bias. In Experiment 2, the authors found stronger evidence of the conversion bias with the same learning task. In Experiment 3, the authors changed the diagnostic-learning task to induce some conjunction fallacies that were not based on the conversion bias. The authors show that the conjunction fallacies obtained in Experiment 3 can be explained by adding an averaging component to M. A. Gluck and G. H. Bower's model. A great deal of research in decision making has focused on people's biases in probability judgment. The main reason for this is that deviations from normative theories are more informative than correct estimations in order to infer the cognitive processes underlying probability judgment, which, in turn, is a basic component of decision making. Some of these biases are remarkable because they seem to involve the violation of some basic and simple principles of the probability theory. Our main purpose is to show that the associative-learning framework can improve our understanding of biases in probability judgment. We focus on three well-known errors: the base-rate neglect, the conjunction fallacy, and the conversion of conditional probabilities (thereafter referred to as the conversion bias). First, let us briefly outline these biases.

The Quarterly Journal …, Jan 1, 2000

According to the comparator process hypothesis , cue competition in the learning of between-event... more According to the comparator process hypothesis , cue competition in the learning of between-events relationships arises if the judgement required involves a comparison between the probability of the outcome given the target cue and the probability of the outcome given the competing cue. Alternatively, other associative accounts (the Rescorla± Wagner model: conceive cue competition as a learning de®cit affecting the target cue±outcome association. Consequently, the comparator process hypothesis predicts that cue competition occurs in inference judgements but not in contiguity ones, for only the ®rst type of judgement implicitly involves such a comparison. On the other hand, the Rescorla± Wagner model predicts cue competition in both inference and contiguity judgements, because it establishes no relevant role for the type of judgement in producing cue competition. In Experiments 1 and 2 we manipulated the relative validity of cues and the type of question (inference vs. contiguity) in a predictive learning task. In both experiments we found a cue competition effect, but no interaction between the relative validity of cues and the type of question, suggesting that the Rescorla±Wagner theory suf®ces to explain cue competition.

Behavioural Processes, 2010

In the present study, we examined the differential effect on backward blocking (BB) and on interf... more In the present study, we examined the differential effect on backward blocking (BB) and on interference between cues (IbC) of including a delay right before the test phase vs. between training phases 1 and 2 in humans. While models of IbC predict a spontaneous recovery (SR) of responding if the delay is placed immediately before the test instead of between phases 1 and 2, BB models predict that no difference should be observed due to the position of the delay. In our experiment, we obtained the SR from IbC but not from BB. These results suggest that backward blocking and interference between cues are likely to be the result of different processes.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 2012

The most common associative explanation of interference is based on a retrieval failure. Retrieva... more The most common associative explanation of interference is based on a retrieval failure. Retrieval, in turn, is considered as the result of an associative activation mechanism that is thought to be fast and automatic. However, up-to-date, there is no evidence of interference based on dependent measures specifically related to this kind of low level processes. The objective of the present study was to test whether interference phenomena can be observed by using a cued response task designed to detect low level retrieval processes. Experiment 1 evaluated whether the cued response task served to show a priming effect. Such effect allowed us to interpret the results found in the remaining experiments of the series. Experiment 2 aimed to find the interference effect by using the cued response task. Experiments 3 and 4 were conducted to assess whether spontaneous recovery and context-change effects could also be observed. The results showed that interference and recovery from interference phenomena can be attributable to fast retrieval processes, which is consistent with associative accounts of interference.

Behavioural Processes, 2009

Retroactive interference between cues of the same outcome (i.e., IbC) occurs when the behavioral ... more Retroactive interference between cues of the same outcome (i.e., IbC) occurs when the behavioral expression of an association between a cue and an outcome (e.g., A → O1) is reduced due to the later acquisition of an association between a different cue and the same outcome (e.g., B → O1). Though this interference effect has been traditionally explained within an associative framework, there is recent evidence showing that IbC effect may be better understood in terms of the operation of higher order causal reasoning processes. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed an IbC effect in a learning task within a game scenario suggesting non-causal relationships between events. Thus, these results showed that IbC may have a diverse origin, one of them being of an associative nature.

Backward blocking (BB) and interference between cues (IbC) are cue competition effects produced b... more Backward blocking (BB) and interference between cues (IbC) are cue competition effects produced by very similar manipulations. In a standard BB design both effects might occur simultaneously, which implies a potential problem to study BB. In the present study with humans, the magnitude of both effects was compared using a non causal scenario and a within subjects design. Previous studies have made this comparison using learning tasks framed within causal scenarios. This posits a limit to generalizing their findings to non-causal learning situations because there is ample evidence showing that participants engage in causal reasoning when tasks are causally framed. The results obtained showed BB and IbC effects of the same magnitude in a non causal framed task. This highlights the methodological need for an IbC control in BB experiments.