We investigated how visual and haptic information was integrated when the position of the real hand was inconsistent with that of mirror image of the rubber hand. Participants placed their left hand behind the mirror placed between their arms, and observed the rubber right hand through the mirror. When the positions of the real and rubber hands were consistent, participants experienced haptic perception in the location that was visually stimulated by the red laser-light. When their positions were inconsistent, they still experienced haptic perception in the location that was visually stimulated by the laser-light. For example, participants experienced a strange feeling that they felt touched on the palm of the fifth finger while the back of the first finger of the rubber hand was stimulated by the laser-light. These results suggest that the haptic information is integrated with the visual information of the spatial locations.

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A near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) study was conducted during which participants carried out tactile recognition of unfamiliar objects. A previous functional brain-imaging study reported activation of the right parietal lobe under tactile recognition of familiar objects using only the right hand (Reed et al., 2005). In this study, we intended to extend the previous finding to tactile recognition of unfamiliar objects with the left hand, as well as with the right hand. Hemodynamic activation of brains of eight healthy young participants was compared between tasks involving recognition of objects made by LEGO bricks and palpation of them, allowing to eliminate the effect of similar motor and sensory stimulation. Compared to nonsense object palpation, the most prominent activation evoked by tactile object recognition was in bilateral parietal lobe, irrespective of the hand used for the task. This suggested contribution of bilateral parietal lobule on tactile recognition for unfamiliar objects.

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[in Japanese]

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This study investigated the advantage and instructional effectiveness of of the spatial graphic representation of an English sentence with coordinators over a linear sentential representation in English as a foreign language (EFL) reading settings. The experiment examined whether the advantage of graphic display of coordinators in the previous experiment was due to Larkin and Simon's (1987) notion of computational efficacy by testing wheter 2 different task-completion times would affect the performance of 2 different display groups. The resluts indicated that the spatial graphic display enhanced EFL readers' comprehnsion of sentences with coordinator more than the sentential display did because of the computational efficacy.

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[in Japanese]

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Presenting a target-like distractor in an RSVP task deteriorates the detection of a trailing target because the visual system has difficulties in rejecting the erroneously accepted distractor. We investigated whether the rejection process is influenced by observers' knowledge regarding possible distractors. Observers identified a letter (target) embedded in a stream of line patterns, rejecting a preceding distractor (digit). We informed the observers about either the category of distractors ("digit") or the identity of the distractor (e.g., "5"). The distractors with certain distractor-target lags increased identification errors, indicating that the distractor rejection process temporarily interfered with the target identification. When the observers knew the distractor identity, the rejection process started later than when they knew only the distractor category. These results suggest that the rejection process may operate at either the category or the individual-item level; however, the setting of the rejection level is not under the observers' control.

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The ability to interpret emotional cues has been argued to play an important role in maintaining successful relationships and healthy psychological functioning. Here, we focused on comprehension of emotional expressions of the eyes. The ability to recognize complex emotions and mental states from the eyes relates to 'theory of mind'. This stusy investigated descriptions of smile of the eyes and face. We created a composite stimulus by joining the eyes part of face expressed an emotion (ex. neutral) with the other parts of face expressed another emotion (ex. smile). The results suggest that the description of eyes and facial smiling is the mouth part of face. However, the recognition of eyes smiling is better at detecting smile of the eyes part than the facial smile recognition.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Japanese two-kanji compound words (Jukugo) have two sets of neighbors: Front-neighbors that share the same front-kanji and Rear-neighbors that share the same rear-kanji of the Jukugo. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the factors affecting semantic similarity among Jukugo neighbors. In a neighbor recall-task using Kyoiku kanji, participants were presented with ten front-kanji and ten rear-kanji on a questionnaire. The participants were asked to write down a rear-kanji and front-kanji to make a neighbor up to eight neighbors within a minute for each cue kanji. The results were analyzed in terms of how factors such as number of neighbors and recall frequency of neighbors affect the semantic similarity rating values among neighbors.

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Event-related potential (ERP) studies in adults have shown that semantically incongruent words elicit larger negative waves (N400) than congruent words. Also positive waves following N400 (late positive component (LPC)) have been reported to be sensitive to semantic congruity. In this study, we investigated the incongruity effects in adults and 4-year-old children during listening to semantically congruent and incongruent sentences. The N400 effect was found for both groups. The negative waves in the children, however, had larger amplitudes, longer peek latencies, and longer durations than those in the adults. The N400s in the children distributed larger over the left frontal scalps, while those of the adults tended to be centrally distributed. The LPCs were observed only in the adults. The results suggest that the semantic processing in children seems to be slower than that in adults, and the EEG topographies related to the semantic processing tend to be different between children and adults.

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Guided by Hsee & Zang(2004)'s argument that the misprediction of happiness contributes to the occurrence of the distinction bias, two studies were conducted to examine the effect of forecasting happiness and regret on choices as a function of quantitative attribute of two alternatives. Experiment 1 revealed that the quantitative attributes of alternatives determined the degree of predicted happiness in the single evaluation condition, but not in the joint evaluation condition, whereas the degree of predicted regret was influenced by the quantitative attributes both in the single and joint evaluation conditions. Experiment 2 indicated the participants made a choice based on the quantitative attributes only when predicting happiness in joint evaluation. These results suggest that the kind of forecasted affect influences the occurrence of the distinction bias.

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We often experience the difference of impression when a performer plays a piece in different intentional expressions. In order to investigate the effect of such different expressions on listener's evaluation of impression, we asked a professional pianist to perform 2 pieces ("Etude Tableaux Op.39-1" and "Prelude Op.32-5": both composed by Rachmaninoff) in 3 different types of expression ("deadpan","artistic" and "exaggerated"). We recorded and used them as auditory stimuli. Participants listened to the 6 stimuli (2 (pieces) * 3 (expressional types)) and evaluated each impression by using 31 epithets of emotion. As a result, the listeners can discriminate the expressional types intended by the performer, and the degrees of the impression differed by them.

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During proofreading, some anomalous words can be detected easily and others with difficulty. The characteristics of proofreading errors may contribute to understanding some part of the reading process. Reading is a complicated cognitive process and depends on so many factors. Assessing the degree of influence of each factor gives us insight into the reading mechanisms. Using multiple regression analysis, we assessed the contribution of factors that each anomalous word had (e.g., phonological or semantic similarity to the contextually correct word, location in sentence, and size of the span of text needed to detect the anomalous word) to the effectiveness of anomalous word detection in proofreading. Novices and professionals in proofreading participated in the experiment. The results showed that the size of the span of text needed for anomalous word detection had especially large influence on anomalous word detection, and that professional proofreaders have special characteristics in processing span of text.

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In a previous study,it becomes clear that there is a specific non-verbal means to enable communicate and adjustment of an idea of music in a performance.But there are few studies quantitatively.What kind of non-verbal information is effective and necessary to do a better performance in a performance scene(a piano performance scene)?This study aim at examining it quantitatively what kind of information is really used in a performance scene of piano duo.As a result,frequency of used information by a performance condition(the different room non- face to face condition,the different room face to face condition,the same room face to face condition)is different.And,as the performance number increases,frequency of used non-verbal information rises and pianist's performance satisfaction rises,too.By this,in piano ensemble,not only a performance sound but also non-verbal information is important.

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The study applies graph theory and network analysis methods to investigating the characteristics of a semantic network representation of the Japanese Word Association Database (Joyce, 2005, 2006). After briefly outlining the Japanese Word Association Database, this study describes the application to the word association network of graph clustering methods, particularly a recently proposed graph clustering algorithm called RMCL (Jung, Miyake, & Akama, 2006a, 2006b). Analysis results indicate that the developed network has scale-free characteristics. Comparisons of clustering techniques demonstrate the usefulness of the RMCL method, and its potential as a tool for visualizing large-scale linguistic resources, such as the Japanese word association database.

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[in Japanese]

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Word order in Japanese sentences is relatively flexible. Many research reported scrambling effects, that readers comprehend sentences with non-canonical word order harder than canonical sentences, however. This study investigated the relation between scrambling effect and semantic plausibility of sentences. Forty embedded sentences and forty fillers were prepared for this experiment. Twenty sentences were canonical and twenty were scrambled. The accusative case marked object (NP-o) in the relative clause was placed in the sentence-initial position to create scrambling sentences. We also manipulated sentence plausibility. Participants were timed in a phrase-by-phrase self-paced reading task. In the region revealing semantic plausibility, the reading times for the implausible condition were longer than the plausible condition for canonical sentences, whereas there was no reliable effect of plausibility for scrambled sentences.

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The present study investigated how accurately people predicted their own and others' task performances. Thirty female undergraduates participated in a group of three and performed a writing task. Participants observed the look of each other during the task and predicted their own and peers' performance in another writing task. As results, there were no differences between self-prediction and other-prediction. Participants predicted both their own and peers' performance more positively than their actual performances. Whereas self-rated personalities were not correlated with self-predictions, the estimated personalities of others were correlated with other-predictions. Although previous studies suggest that people would use their "inside information" when predicting their own behavior, they may not use their self-concept primarily. On the other hand, when predicting the performance by others, people may use the positive information about others' personalities inferred in little time and overlook situational constraints on others' behavior.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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