[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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To investigate the relationship between recall during early childhood and childhood amnesia, I examined whether some memory-related linguistic abilities are related with the recall of events during early childhood by following seven children from the age of 1-2 for about five to six years. Main results are as follows. First, the children achieved the memory-related linguistic skills in the same order: after being able to report events using past tense, they came to understand verbal recognition questions (“First verbal recognition”), and then to use memory-related verbs spontaneously (“Memory-verb acquisition”). Second, the children after the age of “Memory-verb acquisition” recalled significantly more events than they were before that age. Third, when the children were after the ages of “First verbal recognition” and “Memory-verb acquisition”, they recalled significantly less events experienced before the ages. Developmental transition of autobiographical remembering will be discussed in relation to the onset of childhood amnesia.

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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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[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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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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In this presentation, it was intended to investigate whether Hopfield model would mimic human semantic memory or not.  As well-known, connection weights among units in Hopfield model can be interpreted not only as embedded memory traces, but also similarity matrix among features. Also, there are neuropsychological evidences that human performances of concept formation and category judgment are influenced both external stimulus and intrinsic inner memory representation. In this way, several common characteristics can be pointed out between Hopfield model and human semantic memory, it might be worth examining the relationship between Hopfield model and psychological models of concept and category.  In order to determine validity of some psychological hypotheses, mathematical considerations were conducted. The contribution of current stimulus and past experiences to concept formation were further discussed.

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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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We investigated whether the differences of impression evaluation will be generated by evaluating Chinese traditional architecture between Japanese and Chinese observers. The results showed that Evaluation, Potency and Experience factors were extracted. Moreover, the architecture was divided into two groups containing similar impressions separately. The architecture evaluated highly in Evaluation and Potency factors was classified as group-1 in which the significant differences of each of three factors were observed between Japanese and Chinese. In contrast, there are no significant differences of each of three factors in architecture of group-2 containing relatively low averaged rating scores of Evaluation and Potency factors. The results suggest that the differences of impression evaluation between Japanese and Chinese tend to be induced when the architecture is evaluated highly in Evaluation and Potency factors. In addition, we proposed a hypothesis that the different results obtained in two groups might be caused by the Experience factor.

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Vision is not the only modality capable of perceiving space, as haptics is also able to perceive space. However, haptics are only able to perceive a limited number of objects at a time. Thus haptic spatial representations can be seen as being made from sequential haptic inputs. The present study aimed to investigate this issue using a change detection task. Participants were asked to remember the order of 6 cups which were either spatially located, allowing for arm movement, or experimenter handed, not allowing arm movements, then to answer whether there were any changes in order of cups in the recognition test phase. Results showed that participants performed better when they were able to move their arms, suggesting that haptic spatial representations are not stored as simple sequential haptic inputs. The present study suggested that active motion plays a key role in the formation and storage of haptic spatial representations.

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When a stimulus is preceded by a more pleasant stimulus, its pleasantness is rated lower (negative contrast), whereas when a stimulus is preceded by a less pleasant stimulus, its pleasantness is rated higher (positive contrast).In this study, we investigated the occurrence of the contrast effect during sequential evaluation of odor/picture pleasantness. As a result, although contrast effect occurred clearly in vision, only negative contrast was seen in olfaction. These results reflect that, in olfaction, sensitive responses to unpleasant odors presented after pleasant stimuli are more important.

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Although spatial cueing and feature cueing effects on perception have been intensively investigated, their effects on visual working memory (VWM) have remained relatively unexplored. Here we compared the spatial and feature cueing effects during VWM encoding and maintenance. Cueing effects on VWM processing and perceptual processing were also compared to achieve a more holistic understanding of the relationship between attention, perception and VWM. Our data indicate that feature cues are more effective during VWM encoding than during maintenance. Another important finding was that the effect of feature pre-cues on VWM performance was greater than that of spatial pre-cues. Moreover, this strong feature pre-cue effect appears to be specific to memory tasks. These results indicate that feature information might have a special role in guiding the allocation of VWM resources during the memory encoding processes. The present findings have important implications for the nature of both visual attention and VWM.

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Self-chosen items are more likely to be remembered than items assigned by an experimenter (the self-choice effect). In the self-choice condition, during comparison of items, similarities and differences of items seem to be processed (distinctive processing), in order to choose one item. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the self-choice effect was explained by distinctive processing of items. We assumed that it would become difficult to process items distinctively, when semantically associated words were compared repeatedly in successive self-choice trials by a common criterion. In our experiment, we asked participants to choose one from a pair of words repeatedly within the same category, and we controlled the proportion of self-choice trials in the choice phase. The results showed that the self-choice effect in cued recall disappeared when the self-choice trials appeared more often in the choice phase, consistent with the prediction from the distinctive processing account.

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Lee, Frederick, & Ariely (2006) revealed that offensive taste expectations lower beer taste ratings but the same information was not effective if it was given after the tasting. In their experiments, however, the taste was confounded with the brand name. We examined the effect of the timing of disclosure of conceptually disgusting information about a beverage when it is or is not accompanied with a high-valued label. Participants were asked to compare regular orange juice and “special” one (it contained two drops of soy sauce). Although the result replicated Lee et al. (2006) when the orange juices were presented with labels, the information presented after tasting lowered the preference of the participants when the labels were removed. This result indicates that the brand name restrains the negative power of conceptual (attitude determining) information, but it happens only when the information is presented after consumption.

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This study explores relationships between Kusho and Kanji learning by adult beginning learners of Japanese from non-Chinese character areas (JSLNC).  The participants were 9 native speakers of Japanese (NJ) and 9 JSLNC. The participants were asked to decide whether a stimulus on the monitor was true or not true.  Stimulus groups were Real Kanji, Vague Kanji whith minor wrong graphic features, Pseudo Kanji with a wrong combination of a radical and parts, Wrong Kanji with a wrong radical position, and Korean characters.  Two NJ and six JSLNC did Kusho when they were difficult to decide.  All participants could distinguish Korean characters well.  Three JSLNC without Kusho could not distinguish Kanji like characters from Real Kanji.  They may not pay attention to fine graphic differences of Kanji.  JSLNC without Kusho might just copy Kanji forms when they practiced Kanji.  Kusho might reflect deeper internalization of Kanji graphic representation.

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Two experiments were performed. In experiment 1, an influence for explicit memory of taste was confirmed in terms of elaboration. The result showed that elaboration played an important role for explicit memory of taste as well as the other senses. In experiment 2, an implicit memory of taste was examined using “sugar content judgment task." The results showed that an implicit memory of taste was observed .

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Its attention was paid to the response time
of autobiographical memory remembrance and the relation of the contents of
remembrance which are induced by vision / sense of smell / vision, and
sense-of-smell stimulus in this research.
As a result, it was shown that the response time taken to recollect autobiographical
memory in order of the group which carried out simultaneous presentation of the
sense of smell and the vision key, the group which presented only the vision
key, and the group which presented only the sense-of-smell key is short.

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We investigated effectiveness of writing in space for memorization and recall of image. We asked participants to use writing in space or moving fingers during memorizing and recalling picture image. We found that writing in space is effective when memorizing image but not when recalling image. It is suggested that writing in space is effective for memorizing image and it is a universal method for memorization.

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Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is assumed as holding initial visual information such as colors, shapes, and sizes temporally. Previous studies suggested that stored visual objects as VSTM approximately were limited to four types of patterns, and this is called VSTM capacity.  In contrast, VSTM capacity is known as being inversely related to the perceptual complexity, indicating the estimated capacity decreased for more complex stimuli. Present study investigates the characteristics of objects’ features which influence the capacity and complexity of objects in VSTM, by changing their colored/monochrome as coloredness and 2-dimensional/3-dimensional in shapes as mental dimensionality. Tasks for participants were following two types: a visual search task and a change-detection task. As a result, the coloredness affects VSTM capacity, however, mental dimensionality has no such effects. We conclude that VSTM is influenced by primitive features of objects such as color but not visually complex features such as mental dimensionality.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Forty undergraduates intentionally learned 36 words presented on a computer screen one-by-one. Each word was superimposed on one of 36 (Load 1) or 2 (Load 18) different 4-s video clips with background sounds (video contexts). In the Load 18, the same 18 contexts were successively presented. After 5-min filled retention interval, undergraduates received 36 old and 36 new words at random order either on one of 18 old and 18 new contexts (Load 1) or on one of 2 old and 2 new contexts (Load 18), and were required to judge whether or not the currently presented word had been presented at learning. When each old word was tested on the old context, the same context as at learning was used. Hit and A' showed the superiority of the old context condition only in Load 1, whereas FA showed the superiority both in Loads 1 and 18.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Mizuno & Matsui (2012a, b) examined the effect of visual and phonological information on memory span by manipulating the number of characters and that of moras of Japanese words. The results suggested that participants with relatively large memory span rely more heavily on visual information while those with small memory span on phonological information in maintaining words in working memory. We considered that word maintaining strategy relying on phonological information should be disadvantageous than that relying on visual information because many Japanese words have homophones. This study aimed to demonstrate this idea by comparing the memory span of words with homophones and that of words without homophones in presenting the words auditorily. The result showed that the memory span of words with homophones was smaller than that of words without homophones, indicating that the strategy relying on phonological information is inefficient for the maintenance of Japanese words with many homophones.

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[in Japanese]

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