Distraction by background speech stimuli irrelevant to the task to perform was examined using event related potentials. The task of the participants was to respond by pressing the key when a red circle was presented on the display. Thirty red circles and 170 blue circles were displayed one at a time for 1s with the inter-stimulus interval of 1.5s. The number of participants was 24 for Experiment 1, and 23 for Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, recorded news about the university was presented during the visual task, and the participant was instructed to ignore it. After finishing the task, the participant was asked to perform recognition test about the ignored message, and to rate his/her own interest to the news. The P300 amplitude was find to have a significant negative correlation with the recognition test score, as well as with the rating of interest to the news.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in brain regions associated with processing variety of different emotions (joy, humor, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Forty-two healthy right-handed volunteers pariticipated in the study. Six clips were excerpted from movies through our previous experiments of which purpose was to evoke different emotional responses. Subjects were scanned under six emotion-producing conditions. There found significant differences while participants were experiencing emotions. Sadness was associated with significant loci of activation in the superior frontal gyrus and putamen. In the joy condition, significant loci of activation were noted in the superior and middle temporal gyrus. Disugst was accompanied by specific activations of the superior temporal gyrus and hippocampus. Fear was correlated with significant loci of activation in the superior temporal gyrus and putamen. Humor was associated with significant loci of activation in the middle temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. In anger condition, significant loci of activation were noted in the superior temporal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus. These findings suggest that different brain regions are involved in processing different emotions.

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Memory and emotional responses were collected from Korean young and old people one week, three months, and six months after Korean president Roh's sudden death and North Korea's nuclear crisis occurred around the same time. President Roh's death had more emotional impact than North Korea's nuclear crisis on young and old people. Old people experienced more intense emotions in both events and they had still lingering emotion on Roh's death over six months. However, both groups revealed no difference in recalling their episodic details when they heard about the two events, while recalling more about Roh's death than nuclear crisis. In the case of nuclear crisis memory performance decreased as time passed. On the contrary, in the case of Roh's death memory performance decreased at first but did not decrease after 3 months. This study showed some conflicting results with previous studies on flashbulb memory, which was discussed later.

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Intention is known to crucially influence perceptual reversal. How does it work in daily life? To tap this question, a pair of real eyeglasses, ambiguous in their perspective, were presented, and observers were either informed of the reversibility or not, for 60 s monocularly. The results showed that, when in the direction that the lenses were further away than the legs, more observers with intention achieved the reversal. However, when viewed in the opposite direction, most observers failed regardless of intention. Interestingly, across both viewing conditions, most observers? initial organization was the direction that the lenses were nearer, which was suspected more familiar. That is, only when the initial organization was conflict with the veridical organization, observers intention was effective for the reversal, suggesting that the role of intention might be minimal in a real world, rather the relationship between the initial and veridical organizations is more important.

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Considerable evidence has been accumulating that the human visual system has special sensitivity for the radial frequency (RF) patterns, which are deformations of circles defined by sinusoidal modulation of the radius in polar coordinates. RF information plays a critical role in combining retinal images analyzed by the early local linear filters into complex patterns such as faces. Faces are special for the human visual system and they have been in the forefront of art as well. We have archived artworks of representative Korean modern painters and extracted their distinctive styles with respect to RF information of faces in paintings. We then applied these quantitatively defined artists? signatures to authentication of questionable artworks. The results of a scientific approach based on the characteristic of human visual information processing to connoisseurship will be presented. In addition, cognitive evaluation of Korean modern paintings will be discussed with a visual aesthetic viewpoint.

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We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to investigate the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) on unexpected events during simulated driving. The subjects were instructed to respond to a verbal turning-command and to change the driving route immediately (Route-change condition). Compared with the baseline condition (Route-fixed condition), subjects showed greater oxy-hemoglobin concentrations in their left prefrontal cortex. And the first experimental trial under Route-change condition showed greater oxy-hemoglobin concentrations in the left and right hemispheres. The results imply that PFC is involved in unexpected events and the first time of salience stimulus has the most significant effect on PFC.

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It has been debated whether the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) can be explained by word frequency. Zevin and Seidenberg (2002) reported that the AoA effects observed in previous studies would be confounded with the cumulative frequency. On the other hand, some studies reported the effects of AoA using naming, lexical decision, and eyetracking (Juhaz & Rayner, 2006) and have discussed its locus. This study examined whether there would be independent AoA effects and also explored its locus using equi-biased homophones in Korean. In Experiment 1, after collecting the data of age of acquisition and subjective frequency of 1105 noun words with the assumption that subjective frequency would reflect the cumulative frequency well, we constructed the sentences with early and late acquired target words closely matched in subjective frequency. We found that the durations for first fixation, single fixation and gaze were shorter in early acquired words than in late acquired words. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences with high and low frequency words closely matched in AoA. We found that there was no difference between high-frequency and low-frequency words. In Experiment 3, we explored the semantic locus of AoA effect with equi-biased homophones, assuming that the early acquired meaning of a homophone would be more accessible than the late acquired meaning even if the two meanings are equally frequently used. We manipulated the meaning ambiguity (ambiguous vs. unambiguous) of a word and followed it with a word that disambiguated toward (the early acquired meaning vs. the late acquired meaning). The disambiguating word (eopche-ga) related to the early acquired meaning followed the homophone in (1a), and the unambiguous control word in (1b). The disambiguation word related to the late acquired meaning followed the homophone in (1c), and the unambiguous control word in (1d). We found that the go-past times of the disambiguating word in (1a) and (1b) were not different but the go-past times of the disambiguating word in (1c) were longer than in (1d). These results suggest that AoA would be an independent factor and its effect seems to occur at the semantic level.

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The gaze direction of other has an influence to preference formation. In this research, we investigated whether numbers of others who looked at the target raise the preference for it. In the experiment, pictures of four person's faces and one target stimulus were presented in a display, and then some of four person's gazes were directed to the target (four of two or one). As the results, there was a significant effect of numbers of others and preference for the targets which were gazed by four people became higher than gazed by two and one. Moreover, the effect was disappeared when we presented the same four face pictures of one person in place of four different person's faces. From these results, this increase of preference occurred not by the amount of attention to the target but by the numbers of others who showed evaluation of the target by gaze direction.

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In this study, we examined the aftereffects of a train radio communication system, which is not relevant to the train driver's duties on their task performances. Participants (active train drivers) performed three visual tasks (signal monitoring, tracking, and mental calculations tasks) that which characterize train driving. In the experiments, the train radio was played in the background. We found that the participant's reaction time for signal monitoring was shorter after receiving information on the most important message related to the preceding train as compared to the case when messages related to the following train were transmitted. The results reveal that train drivers expect developmental events in the near future and crank up their arousal level after they receive important information about a preceding train, which is most likely to interfere with their own drive. This leads to an increase in their available attentional resource.

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This study aims to figure out the association between information seeking behavior on Web and psychological attribute. A word-of-mouth site of the consumer generated media was made a theme in the present study. This study conducted a questionnaire for undergraduate students to investigate them. This questionnaire investigated about browsing category and purpose,as item of psychological attribute, attitudes towards ambiguity scale, self recognition need scale, sense of basic trust scale and internet addiction scale. As the results, the persons of the strong sense of basic trust tend to trust the information reflecting personality. In addition, the persons who can't suffer the ambiguity don't resolve only ambiguity of objective information but also seek for information for psychological stability. From these results, review information on a word-of-mouth site double as the decision making of purchase and various information resources according to inspection person's psychological peculiarity.

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Implicit attitude toward violations is regarded as a factor in violations. We applied the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure it in nursing. IAT uses priming effects and reaction times. This study has two blocks. In one, subjects react the same way to stimuli of violaions (e.g., "stocking infusion bag") and negative words (e.g., "unpleasurable"). However, they reacted to stimuli of violations and positive words (e.g., "pleasurable"). A relatively faster former block than the latter indicates a stronger implicit attitude. This study examines IAT's validity and reliability. We conducted IAT and a scale of attitude toward safety for medical staff (Kamizono, 2000) for 71 students from a university of nursing. Validity was demonstrated from a difference of the reaction time between the blocks of IAT and a significant correlation between IAT score and the score of sale. Reliability was indicated by dispersion between trials.

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Joint occurrence, a confusion of a conditional probability P(B|A) with a conjunction probability P(A&B), appears frequently in Bayesian problems. In this study, university students were instructed to rank the following probabilities, P(positive|cancer), P(cancer&positive) and P(cancer| positive) in a thematized problem, by their probability in a written format. 25% of the students answered correctly, P(positive|cancer) > P(cancer|positive) > P(cancer&positive). 38% of the students committed the cognitive fluctuation error (Nakagaki, 2006), that is, they equated the conditional probability P(positive|cancer) with the conjunction probability P(cancer&positive) in the ranking problem. This result is consistent with Itoh's (2008) study in which approximately 40% of university students confused P(B|A) with P(A&B) in a Bayesian drawing-of-lots problem. The results suggest the possibility that conditional probabilities and conjunction probabilities are interpreted as identical.

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Cultural differences in the emotion recognition have mainly been reported for facial expressions and to a lesser extent for vocal expressions. But the way in which the perceiver combines auditory and visual cues may itself be subject to cultural variability. In the experiment, pairs of affective faces and voices, expressing either congruent or incongruent emotion, were presented simultaneously. The difficulty between face and voice judgments was matched by adding noises onto the faces. The effect of to-be-ignored voice on the facial judgment was larger in the Japanese than the Dutch group whereas the effect of to-be-ignored face on the vocal judgment was smaller. These results suggest that Japanese are more tuned to vocal processing in the multisensory perception of emotion.

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Task switching is a popular method to see cognitive aging, and previous studies showed that not a local but only a global task-switching cost is larger by older adults than younger adults. In this study, with a variable task-switching task (the numeral selection task), which was executed in Japan and Canada, we analyzed reaction time data in functions of selective dimension (number vs. font size), the congruency between two dimensions, and the existence of local task switching. Younger adults (university students) showed facilitative task-switching effects when they were instructed to select the larger one in number (the non-dominant dimension); however older adults did not show this effect. For trials of the dominant dimension (select the larger one in size) both aging groups showed usual local task-switching costs. The meaning of this task-switching facilitative effect, as well as dependency on languages of congruency effects, will be discussed.

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The effects of age-related decline of cognitive functions, such as visual attention, working memory and planning functions on the use of IT-equipment were investigated. Older participants divided into two groups based on AIST-cognitive aging test (AIST-CAT) scores asked to purchase a reserved seat for the Japanese bullet train, using a ticket vending machine. We pick up two manipulations on a ticuket vending machine (1: Selecting a type of ticket, 2: Entering of route information). Results showed that that the decline in visual attention consistently caused a disruption in searching on two manipulations. The decline of planning function partially affects performance of manipulation on selecting a type of ticket. However, the decline of working memory did not affect performance on two manipulations. The results indicated that the pattern of age-related decline of cognitive functions is differentially related to problems of using IT-equipment.

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In this study, we developed stimuli and questionnaires to create a protocol designed to evoke a variety of emotion. Seven audio-visual film clips (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, stress) were selected and surveys were taken for the verification of the suitability and effectiveness of the selected stimulation set. Using this protocol, we conducted experiments over total of 5 times. During this process, we measured the following bio signals; GSR, ECG, PPG, SKT. To extract meaningful bio signal parameter, we analyzed them in each emotion between the baseline and emotional state for 30 seconds. Through this analysis, 26 meaningful parameters were extracted. For the pattern recognition against the above mentioned emotions with these parameters, we operated the neural network, a decision tree and the discriminant analysis. In conclusion, we have found the differences of the degree of accuracy among 3 kinds of emotion classifiers.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between facial EMG responses induced by humor and depression. Before the experiment, 43 children (age: 12-13, male: 22) rated on depression scale in PIC of Korean version to measure depression. During the experiment, bilateral corrugator and orbicularis were measured before the presentation of the stimulus (60 sec) and during emotional state (120 sec). After the presentation of stimulus, participants rated emotions they had experienced on an emotion assessment scale. The 95.3% of the participants reported they had experienced humor and the reported intensity of experienced emotion was 3.81(5 points scale). Facial EMG showed a significant increase during the humor induction when compared to the baseline. And the result showed a negative correlation between right corrugator and the level of depression. This means that as the score goes higher in the depression scores during the humor state, the facial EMG activity becomes less.

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