Complex working memory span tasks to measure an individual’s working memory capacity are predictive of several aspects of higher-order cognition. This study examined the influence of ranges of storage item sizes for complex span tasks. The ranges of storage item sizes are regularly controlled not to create the potential for ceiling effects among those participants in the upper end of the performance distributions. The current study utilized different storage item sizes for complex span tasks across verbal, numerical, and spatial content domains to examine the memory load caused by the ranges of storage item sizes. In particular, the relations among processing time, processing accuracy, and storage accuracy from the different complex span tasks in storage item sizes were examined. The results point to a different pattern among these components in different memory load complex span tasks. The effects of memory load of these tasks by storage item sizes are discussed.

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Most people can retrieve memory for personally experienced events, but the underlying processes are not well understood. Here we provide the first evidence that base-level activation is an important determinant of episodic memory retrieval. In four experiments, unassociated memory was activated during target retrieval if the unassociated memory had high base-level activation when a recent memory was retrieved as the target. This suggests that a memory with high base-level activation is processed for recent memory retrieval, but not for remote memory retrieval, even if it has no substantial associations with retrieval cues. This finding not only challenges the prevailing view that memory retrieval is executed solely on the basis of cue-to-memory association, but also contributes to elucidating the mechanisms of hippocampus-dependent memory retrieval and its malfunctions.

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A novel task requires forming, maintaining, and executing a task model, which is a mental model concerning whole body of information about the task. In addition, when the context of the task changes, we have to inhibit the old task model and to form a new task model effectively.  Our research investigated individual differences in prospective memory task performance in a situation facing the change of the task context. The task context was manipulated by increasing the occurrence frequency of the prospective targets cuing the execution of an intended action during the latter phase. The results showed that the detection rate of the prospective memory targets in the first block of the later high frequency phase correlated with the individual performance of the shifting task. We suggest that the adjustment of the task model involves shifting function.

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The purpose of the present study is to clarify the characteristics of autobiographical memories of visitors’ experiences of science museums in Japan. A total of 812 adults (293 staffs of science museums, 421 undergraduate and graduate students, and 98 elderly adults), who had experiences of visits to science museums, participated in this study. The participants were asked to rate the preference of science museums at the time of elementary school children, and the autobiograhical memories of the museums in a questionnaire including the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ) consisting of original 38 items and an item relating to the direct influence of the experience on the participants. The data were performed with a factor analysis, and it was found that the MCQ items were composed by five factors: clarity, meaningful interpretation, sensory experiences, temporal information, and feeling. The differential rating patterns for each factor in the three participant groups based on this factor structure of the MCQ. Moreover, multiple regression analyses on these data revealed that the the way that preference of science museums were predicted by the rating scores in each factor was different among the three partcipants groups.

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The aim of this paper was to test encoding specificity on spatial memory.  Thirty-two undergraduates memorized routes from start to goal for either actual space or plane space.  Immediately after encoding task, participants recalled in either actual space or plane space.  The result was that encoding specificity effect has found on spatial memory for recall accuracy.

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  This study examined false memories evoked by blood type stereotypes. Five texts were constructed: (1) a text including 12 stereotypically blood type A personality traits (e.g., industrious); (2) a text including 12 stereotypically female roles (e.g., secretary); (3) a text including 12 words related to the concept stair based on the DRM paradigm; (4) a text including 12 words related to the concept alarm based on the DRM paradigm; and (5) a text including 12 words related to the concept improvement based on the DRM paradigm. The participants read these texts. Recognition tests revealed that blood type stereotypes evoke the highest degree of false memories.

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Directed forgetting effects on happy and angry faces were investigated using the item method. Participants studied list items of happy or angry faces. Half of the items are followed by a remember instruction, and half are followed by a forget instruction. Later, participants were tested for their recognition of the identical persons displaying different expressions including those that they were instructed to forget. The results provided evidence for the directed forgetting effect on happy faces: Items followed by remember instructions were better recognized than items followed by forget instructions. These findings suggest that the emotional valence of the item modulated the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect.

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Jacoby, Shimizu, Daniels & Rhodes (2005) showed that the foil which was presented with the item having been processed deeply at the study phase was recognized at the  recognition test better than the foil which was presented with the item having been processed shallowly at the study phase. This result was explained by Source-constrained retrieval (the self-initiated use of information to constrain what comes to mind from particular source during retrieval). It stimulated reinstatement of processing mode at study phase. Cho & Fujita (2011) was research with action sentence to confirm the generalizability, but didn’t replicate this phenomenon. They thought the result attributed to image generated from action sentence at study phase. This research intended to confirm the generalizability by using phonological process which didn’t need to produce the image form action phase. showed range in application of source constrained retrieval.

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Consistent with the research by Jacoby, Shimizu, Daniels and Rhodes (2005), our previous research revealed the levels of processing affected the recognition of foils when comparing semantic processing and phonological processing for action events. This effect can be interpreted as a result of source constrained retrieval. In the current study, we compared verbal tasks and self-performed tasks which involved enactment of action events. Participants recognized more words if they encoded them through self-performed tasks than verbal tasks. However, the SPT effect did not emerge in the recognition of foils. Consistent with Cho & Fujita (2011), this research has shown that manipulation of encoding does not necessarily lead to the same mode of processing in the recognition of foils.

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Working memory and its capacity limits significantly affect wide range of cognitive abilities, but the mechanisms underlying these limits have recently become controversial. Some researchers have proposed a limited set of discrete, fixed-resolution representations, whereas others have proposed that working memory consists of a pool of resources that can be flexibly allocated such that the more items that are held in memory, the less precisely each can be recalled. To test these models, we used biological motion of point-light walkers as stimuli because such discrepancies may be caused by specificity of the items to be stored. We found that the data were consistent with both models depending on manners of stimulus presentation in our paradigm. This result suggests that memory representation is capable of changing its behavior in different experimental conditions and so that the two models above are not mutually exclusive.

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Differences in difficulty judgments of various memory tasks and estimates of memory performance were investigated between young and elderly people. A questionnaire consisting of 20 types of memory tasks that combined five conditions of stimulus presentation times (2 sec, 4 sec, 8 sec, unlimited) and five conditions of stimulus items (8, 16, 24, 32, 40) were given to participants and judgments regarding the difficulty of each memory task and estimates of memory performance were inquired. When the stimulus presentation time got longer, young people evaluated the difficulty of memory tasks as being less, whereas elderly people’s judgments of difficulty did not change, indicating that the cognition of the relationship between stimulus presentation time (learning time) and the degree of difficulty of memory tasks was different between the young and the elderly. Changes in presentation time did not affect judgments of difficulty regarding memory tasks in elderly people.

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The purpose of this study was to develop the working memory test used new and simple style paper test. First, we made the original version paper tests which were composed with new working memory tests following: new edition trail making task, high-middle-low task, mental rotation task, and etc. Next, these new tests were compared with the old working memory tests which were operation span task, readingspan task and etc. University students (N=85 )participated in both tests. The factor analysis of the original version paper test identified three factors labeled "switching attention function", " division and selective attention function ", and "control function". Based on the results from the structural equation modeling, there was positive and quite high correlation in its scores between the original working memory test and the other old working memory test. These results suggested that the original paper version test was simple, easy and efficient in substitution for the other old working memory test.

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We designed a method for estimating the subjective age of a person using facial images. The subjective age of Japanese, American, and Korean generally tended to be younger than the chronological age. However, because the subjective age was defined relatively to others, the subjective age involved two factors: underestimating their own age, and overestimating the age of other people. In this study, we conducted conventional absolute age estimation experiments on Japanese, American, and Korean in which participants were asked "How old do you think he/she is?" to investigate the two factors. The Japanese and Koreans results indicated that the tendency of younger identity occurred. Moreover, a comparison of the results in the two of experiments confirmed a significant difference in Americans. However, a comparison of the Japanese and Koreans results confirmed no significant difference, and it was suggested that Japanese and Koreans age estimation was influenced by the socio-psychological factor.

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The present study examined how observing consecutively presented numbers would shifts visual attention. We adapted the Posner’s cueing paradigm and prepared 4 types of consecutive presentation of two digits (1-5, 5-1, 5-9, 9-5). The first digit was presented for 300 ms, followed by a 100-ms blank and the second digit for 300 ms. The target appeared either the left or right side of the central fixation 200, 400, or 600 ms after the second digit. Participants were asked to detect the target. The results showed that the interval between the second digit and the target did not influence the detection time but observing the 1-5 and the 5-9 sequences caused shifts of spatial attention towards the right side. That is, attention was shifted rightward after observing an increase in the magnitude of the numbers. These results suggest that the relative magnitude of consecutively presented numbers may have influence on attentional shift.

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Although feminine female faces are always judged as attractive, masculine males face are not. In previous studies, we suggested that perceived threat could suppress attractiveness of masculine male faces; because of structural similarities between facial features which are perceived as masculine and expression of anger, masculine male faces are judged as angry and therefore threatening, and then it turns to suppress their attractiveness ratings. In this study, the contextual information which describes the reason of anger (why he is angry; for social justice/interpersonal conflicts) and targets (the anger is for whom; toward raters/others) is presented in attractiveness ratings. The interaction between masculinity and contextual information in attractiveness ratings is appeared, and it is suggested that how people interpret the anger appeared in masculine male faces has significant effect in attractiveness ratings.

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 It is known that the covert orienting of visual attention task, developed by Posner(1980), has been influential in the progress of many studies on visual attention. Such spatial attention is captured and allocated at a cued position. It is considered to facilitate information processing of visual function.
 However, an action of others can provide oneself some spatial cues in daily situations. So we attempted to prove that the finger-pointing of others had an influence on the attentional capture.
 The experiments based on above assumption were constructed as follow, with three subject factors, namely; a. the cue condition( valid or invalid or neutral), b. stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA :150, 300, 600ms) between the cue and the target, c. stimulus condition(finger-pointing image and arrow image). 
 Using these experiment conditions, we’ll examine the influence of finger-pointing cues to function effectively as to the direction on spatial attention on visual task.

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The present study examined the influence of olfactory impression on the perceived effect of lip balm. A total of 20 female college students were required to apply lip balms with or without natural essences (lemon or vanilla). Then, they rated their perceived experience of the lip balms. Results revealed that, the participants felt that the lip balm with lemon essences made their lips smoother compared to the lip balms without natural essences and with vanilla. Furthermore, the lip balm with lemon had marginally greater moisturizing effect than the lip balm with vanilla. These results suggested that olfactory cognition influences the judgment of other senses, such as touch.

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This research aims at clarifying the cognitive process of “waiting” for solving the waiting time problem in ICT usage by cognitive approach. In this report, the influence of prenotification of line condition on evaluation of satisfaction considering waiting time. 492 participants evaluated the degree of satisfaction considering waiting time, which occurs in e-mail transmission with a mobile phone. The prenotification set up three types, "telling there is no problem on line", "telling there is heavy traffic on line", and "apologizing there is heavy traffic on line." As a result, the satisfaction in with-apology condition and with-problem condition are higher than without-problem condition in long waiting time length, and with-apology condition showed higher degree of satisfaction than with-problem condition in short waiting time length. These results showed that the evaluation of degree of satisfaction was affected by situated cognition of waiting and also the social interaction not just from time perception.

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This research investigated the difference of tactual sensation between fabrics and these pictures, in order to investigate a risk that the actual products cannot be tried on at the mail order. Sixteen participants were presented with 24 kinds of textures (4 cm x 4 cm, 12 clothes and 12 these pictures) and evaluated the judgments of tactual sensation. The results showed the differences of tactual sensation between fabrics and these pictures on bright fabrics with the shade and dark fabrics without the shade. By the results of factor analysis, it was suggested that the determinants of tactual sensation varied with fabrics, these pictures, and colors. 

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This study investigated how control of background texture image influenced impression formation using the facial images in mere exposure effect.We used neutral face and texture images and controlled changing background information (change and unchanged), exposure frequency (3, 6, and 9 times), and sex differences (male image and female image). The participants studied images combined facial images and texture images successively, participants judged preference, familiarity, novelty and recognition. The result showed that, impression rating of female stimulus depended on the conditioning changing background information and exposure frequency. Thereby familiarity was gone up. On the other hand, male stimulus was not influenced on these conditioning.

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Humans perceive outer environments by integrating information from multiple senses. Auditory information often alters visual perception, and many audio-visual interactions have been reported. For example, auditory stimuli alter the motion trajectory from "stream" to "bounce," or changing pitch induces the visual motion illusion. However, these studies utilized compound visual stimuli producing ambiguous perceptions relatively easily. Therefore, we examined whether changing pitch could alter the motion trajectory using simple apparent motion stimuli. The results indicated that downward trajectory was perceived dominantly when descending pitch tone was presented simultaneously. When ascending pitch tone was presented, on the other hand, upward trajectory tended to perceive, while this effect small not significant.

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We investigated whether or not the compatibility effect (CE) in a trial block is modulated by conflict frequency in a block-level. In our experiment, right-handed eighty participants were given the Eriksen-type flanker task in which they were identified a center letter (target; “X” or “N”) among 5-letter strings (e.g., “XXXXX”, “XXNXX”) that were briefly presented to a left or right visual-field. The participants were randomly assigned to the five groups of 16 participants in which the compatibility ratio in a block-level was 17%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 83%, respectively. Also, we manipulated the compatibility between the target and the noise letters. Results showed that the CE was greater as the compatibility ratio was larger. These findings suggested that visual selectivity is modulated by a linear function of the compatibility ratio in a trial block.

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