We examined whether imagining faces seen from new viewpoints improves following face recognition from those viewpoints. Participants remembered a learning stimulus (frontal face; 0°) presented for four seconds and then saw a test stimulus (0°, 30°, or 60°) to make a same-or-different judgment. A cue representing the viewpoint of the test stimulus appeared before or at the onset of the test stimulus. The results showed that for “same” pairs, the preceding cues improved performances on face recognition for the 0° and 30° conditions but impaired performance for the 60° condition. For “different” pairs, however, no effects of the cues were observed. These results indicate that faces seen from viewpoints similar to learned ones are relatively easy to imagine, but such imagination hinders recognition of faces seen from very different viewpoints. This detrimental effect has not been reported for mental rotation of objects, suggesting the involvement of processing unique to faces.

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Disgust for a cluster of objects is referred to as trypophobia. Although physical factors of trypophobic visual stimuli such as density and spatial frequencies has been studied by a previous study (Le et al., 2015), no studies has been done on cognitive factors of trypophobia. In the present study, the participants were asked to rate unpleasantness evoked by Trypophobic Visual Stimuli (Le et al., 2015) and by a new set of images of clusters consisting of natural and artificial objects. The results suggested that clusters of natural objects elicited significantly more unpleasantness than those of artificial images. We speculated that natural images caused more unpleasantness because trypophobia is associated with disgust for scars, sores, and dangerous animals we see in nature (Cole & Wilkins, 2013).

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People diagnosed with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) showed particular temporal processing in multisensory integration. On the double flash illusion (one flash is perceived as twice by the presentation of two beeps), people with ASD was reported to have wider temporal binding window and greater integration than typically developed (TD) people, others found the opposite or inconsistent tendencies. Here, we focused on the fact that there exist five subcategories of ASD trait, and investigated the relationships between ASD traits and the manner of the double flash illusion by using Autism-Spectrum Quotient for TD people. We found the relationships between stronger ASD trait in communication and wider temporal window, stronger ASD trait in social skill and narrower temporal window, and stronger ASD trait in imagination and weaker magnitude of the illusion. These results suggest that each ASD trait could be uniquely related to the particular temporal binding processes of audiovisual integration.

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The present study investigated laterality effect of visuospatial attention using a visual statistical learning. In a learning phase, two different unfamiliar letters were simultaneously presented to each of bilateral visual fields. Triplets consisting of three unfamiliar letters, which were always presented in the same order, appeared in the three visual-field conditions: a left (LVF), right (RVF) and bilateral visual-fields conditions (BVF). Participants were instructed to silently count a triangle occasionally presented to a fixation point. Immediately after the learning phase, the test phase were conducted. Recognition speed for each letter consisting the triplet was measured using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, in which participants had to detect a target within a stream of stimuli. The reaction time obviously decreased with the triplet position in the RVF condition relative to other conditions. These results suggested that attentional resources is dominantly distributed task irrelevant stimuli in right visual space.

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Competition during encoding enhances memories. However, little is known about how the anticipation of victory in a competition affects the memory enhancement. In addition, evidence regarding the individual difference of the effect is still unavailable. The current study investigated these issues. In this study, participants learned words in two conditions of competition including the high and low anticipation of victory (HA and LA), and then recognized the words. The achievement motivation in a competition was also evaluated in each participant. Results demonstrated that the memory enhancement by the competitive encoding was identified only in memories encoded by HA, and that the enhancement was significant only in participants who have high achievement motivation of competition. These findings suggest that the memory enhancement by a competition could be effective only when the victory was highly anticipated, and that the effect could be modulated by the individual difference of motivation for a victory.

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The present study investigated the relationship between dispositional optimism and false recognition. Participants took DRM procedure that is the list-learning method for examining false memories. Each study list consisted of ten words that were semantically related to a lure word that is not presented to participants. At the study phase participants saw twelve lists; 4 positive word lists, 4 negative word lists and 4 neutral word lists. At the test phase participants took the recognition test, in which participants were presented to the old items (participants saw previously), the control items (participants did not saw previously) and the lure items (participants did not saw previously while they were semantically related to the study lists). The results showed that false recognition of the lure items in the neutral lists was negatively correlated to dispositional optimism, indicating that dispositional optimism facilitates monitoring mechanism.

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In this study, we considered validity of pupuil size as an on-line measure of retention in visual working memory. Actually, Unsworth and Robinson (2015) measured pupil size during a change detection task and found that pupil size changes with the increase of number of items to be held in visual working memory. We conducted a replication attempt of Unsworth and Robinson (2015) and found the similar results (Exp 1). However, it is possible that the display brightness level or the encoding processing of the sample array might have influenced changes of the pupil size. To exclude these possibilities, we used a visual search task presenting the same array as the search array (Exp 2). In this condition, the pupil dilation did not persist during the delay period. The results indicated that pupil size is a valid on-line measure of retention in visual working memory.

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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 recall was decreased on instruction condition, however, the
instruction did not influence correct recall. These results suggest that
directed forgetting instruction selectively affect to false memory. However, correct
recall often decreases directed forgetting instruction. Therefore further work
is needed to explore this effect.

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Isarida, Fukasawa, & Isarida (2015) investigated odor-dependent recognition for short and long study-time conditions. The results were well accounted for by the encoding specificity. Noteworthy odor-dependent recognition was found in both of the study-time conditions, whereas place-dependent recognition was not found in the long study-time condition possibly suppressed by the outshining (Isarida, Isarida, & Sakai, 2012). This result might indicate that the cue strength of odor is stronger than that of place. The present study investigated whether odor-dependent recognition would be outshone by stronger item cues. Thus, we shortened the list length from 40 (Isarida et al., 2015) to 30. Neither short nor long study-time condition revealed odor-dependent effect with the shorter list. Furthermore, Cohen's d values of global environmental contexts, that is, odor, place, and background-music contexts, decreased as a function of Hit rate in DC condition (estimated strength of item strength).

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Previous studies found better recognition memory for the sentences with second-person pronoun than the sentences with first- or third-person pronouns. This result is explained by the notion that because the second-person pronoun elicits a deeper simulation of reader's sensorimotor experience related to the presented sentence. The present study investigated the effect of pronouns for recognition memory of text written in Japanese, which is one of the pro-drop languages. Participants read and encoded the three sentences scenarios preceded by ‘I’, ‘You’, or ‘s/he’. After a 10-min filler task, participants performed a recognition task. Inconsistent with the previous studies, recognition sensitivity (d’) did not show any differences among the pronouns. We interpret this result as evidence that mental simulation of perspectives evoked by pronouns does not occur or does not affect recognition memory even if the simulation occurs in the Japanese language.

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We examined the effect of cue types on the modified Sternberg task. In this task, participants memorized two lists and determined whether the probe was relevant to a cue. Oberaeur (2001) reported the set size effect of an irrelevant list diminished when the cue-stimulus interval (CSI) was 1,000 ms, which suggests irrelevant information was removed from working memory. While Oberaeur (2001) employed color as a cue, Tamaki and Naito (2015) used both a spatial cue and a color cue to increase competition in working memory. They observed the set size effect of irrelevant lists in longer CSIs (2,000 ms), suggesting competition could delay removal. However, using two types of cues possibly confounded their results, so we compared cue types directly in this study. But the ANOVA revealed no significant effect from cue type. The results suggested the both cues are equivalent information only in the task.

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Source monitoring is defined as making attributions about the origin of a memory. In this study, the researchers investigated the causal relationship between working memory and source monitoring by giving adult participants the verbal dual task and affecting their working memory. It was predicted that the verbal dual task would hinder the functioning of working memory and affect source monitoring. Forty university students participated in this study. A half of them were randomly assigned to an experimental condition, and the other half to a control condition. All the participants completed working memory tasks. They also did source monitoring tasks twice in the first and second sessions. In the second session a verbal dual task was given to participants only in the experimental condition. It was found that the verbal dual task hindered the source monitoring performance.

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