Francisco Ángel José Lizarralde

Análisis de una Plataforma Virtual 3-D Descentralizada para el Desarrollo de Simulaciones Educativas

The aim of this work was to determine if the Open Cobalt platform has the necessary features to implement interactive simulations in a collaborative environment. The use and development of resources such as Open Cobalt, a tool for creating virtual worlds, present an interesting research field, from the technological perspective as well as from the educational point of view. This platform was selected for analysis mainly because it has a decentralized communications scheme and it is developed in a dynamic programming language. A set of features of the platform was chosen to analyze and based on the tests results it is concluded that Open Cobalt has the necessary resources to generate interactive simulations in a collaborative environment.

Core Semantic Links or Lexical Associations: Assessing the Nature of Responses in Word Association Tasks

AbstractThe processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain a matter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical co-occurrences, others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those describing the object denoted by the cue word). Results indicate that 72.5% of the responses had medium-to-high coincidence with such defining semantic features. Moreover, 75.51% of responses had medium-to-high values of Relevance (a measure of the importance of the feature for construing a given concept). Furthermore, most responses (62.7%) referred to elements of the situation in which the concept usually appears, followed by sensory properties (e.g., color) of the denoted object (27.86%). These results suggest that the processes behind WA tasks involve a reactivation of the cue item’s semantic properties, particularly those most relevant to its core meaning.