Pre-perceptual emotional processing is known to occur rapidly before perceptual processing. Facilitation effects in sensory processing due to pre-perceptual emotional processing can be observed in visual search or attentional blink tasks. However, previous event-related potentials studies have suggested that pre-perceptual emotional processing affects the lower-order stage of sensory processing, which differs from the processing involved in visual search or attentional blink tasks. Therefore, we investigated this facilitation using a masking paradigm. We found that the sensitivity of emotional stimuli was higher than that of neutral stimuli. From the correlations between amygdala activation and pre-perceptual emotional processing, the amygdala would be suggested to extract the feature related to emotional arousal from visual stimuli and affect the following various processes of perception.

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Our preliminary study investigated the relationship between early life stress (ELS) and the degree of frontal activations during a resting state and self-oriented task using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). From 22 healthy participants, regional hemodynamic changes in front-temporal channels were recorded during 5 min resting states, and execution of a self-oriented task (color-preference judgment) and a control task (color-similarity judgment). Using a child abuse and trauma scale, ELS was quantified. We observed that ELS showed a negative correlation with medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) activation during both resting state and color-preference judgment. Additionally, we found that, for participants with higher ELS, decisions in the color-preference judgment were based on an external criterion (color similarity) rather than an internal criterion (subjective preference). Taken together, our neuronal and behavioral findings show that high ELS is related to lower MPFC activation during both rest and self-oriented tasks. 

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Although problems of older adults to use new artifacts have been attributed mainly to cognitive and perceptual/ motor aging, there are also emotional aspects of aging, e.g., “timid to use”, affecting to use new artifacts. To know about this “timidity”, we investigated effects of “external risks” on usage of artifacts with young and older adults. Participant operated a biped walking robot (height 25cm) and to get through the path on the table of 70cm high. On the risky condition, the instruction to be careful was added, and the path was set at the edge of the table, while the path was set at the center of the table with the control condition. The results indicated that external risks made both age groups to behave circumspectly, indicating independence of external risks and timidity. On the contrary, the hazardous dropping of the robot showed strong impacts only on behavior of older adults. 

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   The present study investigated whether the familiarity of background-musical selections influences the musical cue strength. The experiment used a one-way between-participants design employing four levels of familiarity of background-musical selections. Before experimentation, 12 undergraduates, who did not participated in the experiment, rated the familiarity of 17 pieces of music on a 7-point scale ranging from quite unfamiliar (1) to quite familiar (7). 60 undergraduates were randomly assigned into the 4 between-participants conditions. The undergraduates individually received 16 words one-by one at a rate of 4 s per word, and were required orally to report free associated word(s). After a 2.5-min filled retention interval, the under graduates received an oral free-recall test. During both the word presentation and the free-recall test, the same piece of music was presented. As a result, free recall significantly decreased as a function of the familiarity. The implications of the results were discussed.

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Directed forgetting effects on happy and neutral faces were investigated using the item method. Participants studied list items of happy or neutral 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 both happy and neutral faces: Items followed by forget instructions were worse recognized than items followed by remember instructions.

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This research combined the DRM paradigm with intentional/incidental learning paradigm, and participants received directed forgetting instruction. In this combined paradigm, participants were presented pairing words, and one side is learned intentionally and another side is learned incidentally. Using this paradigm, more intentional process and automatic process are examined simultaneously within participants. It is known from previous work that false recognition is influenced by the intentional process. Therefore, this study examined influence of directed forgetting that forget presented words consciously. As a result, false recognition was influenced by strongly intentional processing and by weakly incidental processing. However, the influence of directed forgetting instruction was not confirmed. It is assumed that the directed forgetting instruction is not effective for the decrease in false recognition in the DRM paradigm. But many participants introspected they could not forget. Therefore, further work is needed to explore this effect.

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The present study investigated whether levels of construal affect retrieval-induced forgetting. The research on construal level theory suggests that higher-level construal (e.g. thinking “why”) promotes relational encoding, whereas lower-level construal (e.g. thinking “how”) encourages item-specific encoding. Based on previous evidence showing relational encoding reduce or even eliminate retrieval-induced forgetting, we hypothesized that the high-level construal condition, which participants were asked to consider why they engage in certain activity, elicits retrieval-induced forgetting, but the low-level construal, which participants were asked to consider how they engage in certain activity, would not. We conducted two experiments and reported the integrated results across two experiments using meta-analysis. The results of meta-analysis showed that retrieval-induced forgetting occurred in the low-level construal condition, whereas the high-level construal did not. Accordingly, these results support our hypothesis, and thus thinking “why” can eliminate retrieval-induced forgetting even if this thought is not related to learning itself.

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This study investigated the relationship between purchase satisfaction and autobiographical memory in younger and older adults, using a questionnaire including the items of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ). The most memorable event on purchase was chosen by each participant. The characteristics of the remembered events were mainly examined in terms of the participants’ age and purchase satisfaction. The data from 394 undergraduates as younger participants and 207 students in a senior college as older participants were analyzed. The results indicated that events of the dissatisfied purchases were less likely to be remembered both in younger and older participants. In younger participants, purchase satisfaction affected vividness of temporal and spatial information for the events. In older ones, however, the dissatisfied purchases were vividly recalled as much as the satisfied purchases, and had the implications. These results implied the need for future studies on purchase behavior in relation to autobiographical memory.

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The purpose of the present study is to clarify the pattern of the developmental change of self-assessment on everyday memory in adulthood using the Everyday Memory Questionnaire (EMQ). A total of 299 adults (99 younger adults aged 19-25 years, 97 middle-aged adults of 38-55 years, and 103 older adults aged 63-75 years) partcipated in this study. The participants were asked to rate the 28 item, each describing an everyday activity which might involve forgetting or memory failures, with a 9-point scales from 1 (not at all in the last 6 month) to 9 (more than once a day). The results showed that the developmental differences among younger (Y), middle-aged (M), and older (O) participants in ratings for each of 28 items were roughly classfied into 4 patterns; (a) Y=M=O, (b) Y>M>O, (c) Y=M>O, (d) Y>M=O.

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Numeral classifiers syntactically require subsequent nouns, and they restrict semantic categories of the nouns. However, a previous study that used event-related potential showed that integration of a nouns and a numeral classifiers involves only semantic processing when they were presented as a word pair. The present study investigated whether the same is true when nouns and numeral classifiers are presented in sentences. As a result, a noun that does not correspond to precedent numeral classifier elicited not only N400 that reflects semantic integration, but also P600, which reflects structural processing. This suggests that integration of numeral classifiers and nouns involves different processes depending on experimental condition. In addition, we found an enhanced anterior positivity for classifier violation in 160-240 ms interval, which may reflect processing specific to numeral classifiers.

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This study explored the effects of semantic cues and comma insertion on the processing of garden-path sentences in Japanese. Pupil diameter was measured to monitor cognitive loads required in sentence processing. Participants read the Japanese relative-clause sentences with a temporary ambiguity with or without semantic information and/or a comma, which were expected to help readers to avoid garden paths. The results showed that pupil sizes showed marked dilations indicating increased cognitive load after the target word in the condition in which neither of the cues was absent, while either of these cues could reduce the pupil size. Interestingly we found a significant interaction between them, which indicated that readers used semantic information and a comma for sentence processing not independently. The semantic information dominated over comma, suggesting that language comprehension involves a complex process in which various sources of information at different levels interact with each other to disambiguate sentences.

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Fukuda(2012a,b) found that the recall performances of items and sentences in the five- and seven-syllable rhythm sound condition were better than those in the none rhythm sound condition.  Also in the processing of the five- and seven-syllable rhythm sound condition, on the other the right brain activated in predominance in the processing of the none rhythm sound condition(Fukuda,2013).  These findings indicate that sentences involved the five- and seven-syllable rhythm sound are suitable to recite for Japanese.  This experiment investigated whether there are some advantages of sentences involved the five- and seven-syllable rhythm sound to recite for second language learners as well as native speaker by using a measurement of NIRS.  The results showed that the left brain activated in predominance regardless of the both conditions.  It suggested that second language learners might allocate their cognitive resources to process the meaning of sentences before paralinguistic information.

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The current study examined how external stimuli prompt meta-awareness of mind wandering, focusing on disrupting focus attention. Participants were asked to identify and respond to the target’s location, and reaction times were measured. A salient cue (red circle) appeared randomly before the target. To acquire points when the cue prompted meta-awareness of mind wandering, participants were asked to press a key when they caught their mind wandering state. On the one hand, to acquire points when meta-awareness did not occur despite the cue presentation, a probe to ask participants whether they were in the mind wandering was presented after the 40% cues. Results showed that increase of reaction time just after the cue was found only when participants detected mind wandering after the cue. This seemed to reflect that the cue disrupted the focus attention to the mind wandering, supporting the hypothesis that disruption of focus attention triggers the meta-awareness.

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The present study investigated whether the motor functions of older adults affect the range of peripersonal space, defined as the space where visuotactile interactions occur in the visuotactile crossmodal congruency task. Participants discriminated the location of vibrotactile target stimuli presented to either the left or right hand while they tried to ignore visual distractors that could independently be presented at several distances away from the tactile stimuli on either the same or the opposite side. Only the visual distractors located adjacent to the hands influenced tactile judgments for younger adults and the older adults who showed good motor performance (Timed Up & Go Test). In contrast, even the visual distractors located more than 30 cm away from the hands affected the judgments for the older adults who showed poor motor performance. These findings suggest a close link between motor functions and the representation of peripersonal space in older adults.

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