Research
Pedro Magalhães is a doctoral student supported by a Bial foundation grant. He studies the extent to which expectations can modulate cognitive conflict observed in the Stroop task. Expectations are based on previous personal and social experience and can be induced or re-formulated through different suggestion-induction procedures such as hypnosis and placebo (nocebo). The key research question is to know the extent to which these different suggestion procedures differ in reinforcing cognitive control to overcome the conflict in the Stroop task. In addition, he investigates the relationship between agency and ownership under hypnotic states. He is also particularly interested in the importance of metacognition in defining the difference between conscious and unconscious processing. Accordingly, he uses hypnosis procedure, suggestion and hypnotizability to modulate task performance (type I) and conscious awareness (type II) sensitivity so to establish the relationship and the degree of dependency between each.
