It has been revealed that external stimulated manipulation of physical activity has moderating effects on people’s emotional experiences and the decision-making procedures. (Strack & Stepper, 1988). On the other hand, in the domain of memory study, memorytends to be different when retrieved in different moodstates. (Congruence Hypothesis, Risking, 1983). In study 1, subjects were holding a pen in their mouths to evoke either positive or negative emotion state; in study 2,subjects used a tear drop glasses (with without tear dropping process) when trying to retrieve memory from their past, and the difference will be discussed according to the memory retrieved in those two situations. As a result, in both cases, no matter when subjects held a pen in mouth or experienced a manipulated tear, it showed that people’s memory could be influenced when associated with an external stimulated manipulation of physical activity.

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We examined inter-brain coupling of paired Liar and Detector in a face-to-face communication condition using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). In the Learning Session, Liars read presented sentences and performed Action (enactment of) or Speech (reading aloud of) a presented sentence. In the Recognition Session, Liars recognized their performance for each sentence presented in the Learning Session by a key press. In the Lying Session, Liars read the same sentences and then performed one of the following tasks by key press and immediate verbal report: Truth and Lying (honestly and dishonestly report performance conducted in the Learning Session, respectively). Then, only the Detector received true-false feedback for lie detection on a monitor. We measured the brain activities of paired participants during the Lying Session. The detection rate of a Detector was approximately 50%. NIRS data of paired participants showed a significant inter-brain correlation in their right IFG for correct Detector responses.

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We have developed a novel stress model with high ecological validity using a chasing robot. To emulate predatory threat, rats were repeatedly chased by a fast-approaching robot in an inescapable, donut-shaped circular maze. In Exp. 1, validity of the chasing stress model was tested by measuring the plasma corticosterone(CORT) level and freezing and ultrasonic vocalization (USV). In Exp. 2, rats were tested for the memory of the chasing stress and sensitivity to another aversive situation, three weeks later. The results demonstrated that a distinctive pattern of stress responses and long-term sensitization of defensive response in subsequent aversive events could emerge following chasing stress by a fast-approaching artificial object that emulates an attacking predator. The new stress paradigm would open up a new possibility to investigate how an evolutionarily preserved defensive system mediates stress response and related psychopathology.

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Previous studies, using a first-person perspective (1PP) in the hand laterality judgment (HLJ) task, have shown that the HLJ depends on biomechanical constraints (BC) for hand rotation. We measured activation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) to investigate whether the HLJ from a third-person perspective (3PP) also shows the BC effect. The right-handed participants judged whether a rotated hand picture was their own or the other’s (1pp vs. 3PP groups) left or right hand, respectively. Using their error rates, the two groups were subdivided into Error sub-Group and No Error sub-Groups. The NIRS profile of EsG in 3PP group showed a significant interaction of hand laterality × orientation in their left PFC. Specifically, the left PFC activation of two EsGs between 3PP and 1PP groups showed a significant interaction for the HLJ of presented left hand indicating that BC interferes with the HLJ performed from the 3PP as well as the 1PP.

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The purpose of this visual half-field study is to investigate the effect of ambiguity advantage effect and frequency effect on hemispheric functions that affect the semantic processing of an ambiguous eojeol, which is the basic unit of Korean sentences. As a result of the experiment, the ambiguity advantage effect and frequency effect appeared when the ambiguous eojeols was presented in the left visual field(right hemisphere). It is suggested that the activation of subordinate semantics of the ambiguous eojeol appears in the right hemisphere and the process of selecting appropriate meaning among the subordinate semantics of the ambiguous eojeol appear in the left hemisphere.

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The NTT Kanji database (Aman and Kondo, 1999) is one of the most popular kanji datasets. However, it has been long ever since it published. The word2vec (Mikolov, et al., 2013) was proposed based on large vocabulary dataset. In spite of their popularity, any comparisons have not been tried so far. We tried to figure out differences between them in terms of several ways.

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Script execution often requires detecting and resolving conflict with the goal particularly in non-routine situations where our daily lives are frequently disrupted by unpredicted events. Although previous developmental studies demonstrated that young children could gradually acquire the ability to control script execution in non-routine situations, few studies have explored the control process underlying executing scripts. We investigated the development of hierarchical goal representation maintenance in the control of script execution and its relationship between executive functions. To measure the ability to execute script, we employed a “closet doll task”, in which young children helped a doll to wear seven items to attend kindergarten. Our experiment demonstrated that the development of the control process underlying executing scripts in non-routine situations is partly depending on the development of maintaining hierarchical goal representations. The investigation also demonstrates that inhibition is associated with the control of script execution.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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We can discriminate between deceptive and genuine faces. We investigated how we use spatial frequency components for the discrimination. In a previous study, participants were asked to generate instructed faces by tuning the intensity of a smiling and angry expression. In the present study, participants were asked to classify presented faces composed of the low and high spatial frequency (LSF and HSF) expressions as either deceptive smile, deceptive anger, genuine smile, or genuine anger. The intensity of the expression were changed from +10 (the most smiling) to -10 (the most anger). LSF and HSF components of the images were varied independently. The results showed that a deceptive smile consisted of different intensities between LSF and HSF, as shown in the previous study. Therefore, we can conclude that we discriminate between deceptive and genuine smiles by using the unbalanced intensities of expression in LSF and HSF.

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[in Japanese]

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It is necessary to clarify the nature of the hand action representations automatically elicited by familiar handled objects, such as a teapot. By past experience, we have interaction of objects and the observer, regulation grasping action, and congruent orientation of observer’s body and object. To understand the effective grasping of everyday tools, it is necessary to consider the arrangement of the observer’s hand and the tools being used. Effective grasping was tested using various arrangements of familiar or unfamiliar everyday tools and hands were positioned appropriately to perform the grasping action. Participants were shown pictures of familiar or unfamiliar objects and asked to judge whether or not they could grasp the objects. The results showed that familiarity with the tools affected the errors in grasping judgment.

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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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There are two possible mechanisms of understanding others’ emotion: cognitive process and empathic process. Current evidence suggests that emotional empathy is caused by embodied simulation. So, we assume that emotion recognition is related to imitative response throughout emotional empathy. In this study, we focused on the individual differences in the capacity of emotional empathy, then investigated the influence of empathy on imitative response while emotion recognition. Participants estimated emotion of facial expressions and filled a questionnaire about emotional empathy. During the task, we recorded facial muscle activity, heart rate, sweating and skin temperature. There were significant correlations between the emotion estimation scores and the physiological signals only in a low empathy group. This is consistent with the previous result that automatic imitative response was inhibited by social context. Thus, our results suggest that imitative response affect to emotion recognition but high empathy individuals inhibit superficial imitative response.

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Ickes (2001) defined the ability to accurately infer the internal state of other people as “Empathic Accuracy”. In this study, we examined the relationships between self-reported empathy and two empathic accuracy which reflected emotional or cognitive elements. Our results showed that both empathic accuracies were related to the ability to imagine replacing herself or himself with a character (i.e., fantasy scale). Furthermore, more cognitive empathic accuracy also was negatively related to body listening that is similar to the sensitivity to one’s own experiences, while more emotional empathic accuracy was positively related to emotional contagion scale that means the tendency to share emotional experiences with other persons. Future studies need to confirm the robustness of the results of our study using empathic accuracy on another situations or contexts.

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[in Japanese]

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The aspects of motivation include not only direction such as expectancy and values but also intensity which is energetic and dynamic aspect. Although intensity is generally estimated from behavioral indicators, conventional methods do not sufficiently assess the dynamic change in intensity. We devised an experimental paradigm to measure this change more directly, and examined its effectiveness. We compared participants’ handgrip for 30 seconds before and after the experimental manipulation of giving rewards with the overlap of 95% confidence intervals, and estimated the dynamic change in motivational intensity. We presented 25 participants (N = 50) each with verbal or monetary rewards. Results showed that verbal reward continuously improved overall grip force for 30 seconds, and monetary reward temporarily improved grip force after confirmation of the reward. Based on the results, we discuss the contribution of this experiment paradigm to motivation research.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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The developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder diagnosed based on “motor performance that is substantially below expected levels, given the person's chronologic age and previous opportunities for skill acquisition” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). 21 adults with DCD and 21 neurotypical adults were recruited to examine the effects of motor abilities and empathy on the subjective time production. Empathic abilities were measured by Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983) and motor abilities were measure by the manual dexterity task (Henderson et al., 2007). The results showed that the poor motor skills predict that worse accuracies of the time production, and lower empathic abilities (emotional empathy scores) predict worse accuracies of the time production. Additionally, the low accuracies of time production were based on comorbid autism spectrum characteristics rather than DCD characteristics itself, based on the analysis of covariance on ‘Autism spectrum Quotient’ scores (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) as a covariate.

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Sense of agency stems from the action-effect congruency based on internal prediction. Explicit measure of sense of agency includes self-report judgment. In contrast, implicit measure consists of the degree of intentional binding in which the temporal action-effect interval is perceived as shorter than the actual interval. We examined whether agency judgment and intentional binding correlate while being modulated by the action-effect temporal congruency. Participants performed voluntary keypresses that triggered a tone after variable delays. Subsequently, participants rated their agency over the tone and estimated the keypress-tone interval. The agency rating and degree of intentional binding decreased with increasing tone delays. Importantly, there was a positive correlation between the slopes of linear regression for agency rating and intentional binding with the tone delay as an independent variable. These results suggest a common basis for the explicit and implicit agency in terms of temporal prediction.

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[in Japanese]

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Three kinder garden teachers took some kids to a river side, a flash flood occurred, and a kid died. The focus was that if the accused could have predicted the flash flood. This experiment was conducted to test if people are susceptible to hindsight bias in this trial case. University students were presented four pictures actually taken before the flash flood and were asked to rate how muddy the river looks on 7-point scale and to infer the probability of flash flood from the muddiness. The participants in the outcome group were instructed that a flash flood was actually occurred and there were victims. Those in the outcome condition judged that the river was muddier and the probability of flood was higher than those in the control condition. We concluded that it is plausible that people are susceptible to hindsight bias on perceptual and probability judgment.

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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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Spatial perspective-taking (SPT) is a cognitive process to understand spatial relationships from a perspective other than the one’s own. Muto, Matsushita, and Morikawa (2015) found that response time for a SPT task using scene stimuli was shortened when a responding foot (left or right) was congruent with the direction of SPT (clockwise or counterclockwise) compared to when a responding foot was incongruent. To identify the mechanism of this perspective-response congruency effect (PRCE), the current study manipulated the presentation position (left or right) of the scene stimuli. Results showed that the PRCE occurred when the stimuli were presented on the side opposite to a responding foot but did not occur when the stimuli were presented on the same side as a responding foot. This result indicates that the PRCE cannot be accounted for by neither stimulus-response compatibility nor sensorimotor interference, and supports the mediating role of simulated whole-body movement in SPT.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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This study investigated the causal relationship between working memory and source monitoring by giving adult participants dual tasks that would interfere with verbal short-term memory or verbal working memory. It was predicted that the interference of the functioning of working memory would decrease source monitoring accuracy. Forty-three university students participated in this study. A half of them were randomly assigned to the STM interference condition, and the other half to the WM interference condition. All the participants completed working memory tasks. They also did source monitoring tasks three times. In the source monitoring tasks, there were three conditions: the encoding load, the retrieval load, and the control. Regardless of individual differences in the working memory capacity, the STM interference under the encoding load condition and the WM interference under the encoding and retrieval load conditions decreased the accuracy of the source monitoring.

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We investigated the picture superiority effect on recognition. The purpose of this experiment is to examine if the effect is on correct rejection and thus reduce false memory, and to test the conceptual distinctiveness hypothesis. We composed a list of 30 items from three categories: vegetable, animal, and insect. Items were presented one by one either as picture (the picture group) or as words (the words group). Our participants were instructed either to name the item or to name the item’s category. As the results, we found that both the effects of picture superiority and of naming were both on correct rejection. The performances of correct rejection was higher in the name condition. The conceptual distinctiveness hypothesis was supported to explain the naming effect, but it is not certain if it can explain the picture superiority effect.

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[in Japanese]

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Previous studies on empirically suspect beliefs (ESB) have suggested that the beliefs were negatively associated with the analytic and reflective cognitive style, hence the analytic individuals were less likely to have such beliefs. However, it was also exhibited that the intuitive cognitive style rather than analytic style was a better predictor of the ESB; and that the analytic style sometimes foster ESB among the Japanese participants. The present study aimed to investigate the predictability of cognitive ability (e.g., logical reasoning and numeracy), cognitive style, other thinking dispositions, and personality trait on ESB for both the Japanese and the Western participants. The present results indicated that the intuitive cognitive style was strongly (and positively) associated with the beliefs compared to the analytic style and other mediating variables. In addition, the present study also suggested a significant cultural difference in a way that such styles affected the ESB.

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Previous studies have shown that individuals often choose one object between two objects using a simple heuristic (e.g., recognition, familiarity, or fluency heuristic) in a binary choice task. In the present study, we propose a new heuristic called familiarity-matching, which predicts that when a decision maker is familiar (or unfamiliar) with an object presented in a question sentence, s/he will choose the more (or less) familiar object from the two alternatives. We examined inference processes of familiarity-matching through a behavioral experiment. Results showed that participants indeed tended to employ familiarity-matching and that they often used familiarity-matching especially when solving difficult binary choice problems.

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Many previous studies have measured sense of direction using self-evaluation questionnaires. Although self-evaluation questionnaires succeeded in predicting one’s wayfinding performance and training efficacy, they do not always reflect actual competency accurately. When one is not competent enough, he/she tends to overestimate his/her own competency. The present research focused on the discrepancy between one’s self-evaluation regarding sense of direction and his/her actual competency, and investigated the effect of meta-cognition on spatial cognition. We measured the sense of direction, understandability of the pathway description, and wayfinding performance of 1,000 participants, and then investigated the relationship between them. Cluster analysis showed “poor sense of direction with complete self-confidence,” who has high level of self-evaluation but low level of competency, in addition to “poor sense of direction“ and “good sense of direction” in previous researches. This suggests that there is a considerable difference between some participants' actual and perceived spatial cognitive skills.

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Previous studies have shown that a single person can exploit “wisdom of crowds” by her/himself. This is achieved by aggregating multiple “quasi-independent” estimates from the same person. However, previous methods proposed were not necessarily efficient to utilize. Therefore, we propose a new efficient method for exploiting the wisdom of crowds in one mind, based on perspective-taking.Two behavioral experiments revealed that our method effectively induced the wisdom of crowds by a single individual. More importantly, participants in our method made estimations more quickly compared to those utilizing a previously described method, suggesting that our method required a relatively diminished cognitive load for participants. Further investigation suggested that our method was relatively immune to adverse effects of confidence toward problem solving. Therefore, the present findings show that our method could be effective and efficient method for inducing the wisdom of crowds in one mind.

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[in Japanese]

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Previous studies have shown that people choose a frame (e.g., “half full” or “half empty”) based on shift of quantity in communicating quantitative information. We examined whether people intentionally chose a frame based on the shift of quantity. We asked participants to choose the frame conveying content of water in a glass between “half full” or “half empty.” When the shift of water in a glass was presented with a cover story, many participants described the shift of water as a frame choice reason (Experiment 1). In contrast, when participants performed priming task (answering the amount of water in a glass) before the frame choice task, no one described the amount of water in the priming task although it affected frame choice. These results indicated that frame choice was affected by implicit process as well as intention.

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[in Japanese]

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We investigated the relationship between the visuospatial attention and the focused attention in the elderly. Twenty-one right-handed adults over 65 years old was given a Posner-type gaze-cueing task and Digital Cancellation Test (D-CAT). Each trial of the gaze-cuing task began with the face with eyes which looked toward left or right followed by a target presented at the left or right visual-field. They were required to the location of the presented target. In D-CAT, the participants were instructed to search specified digits and to delete each one with a slash mark, as quickly and accurately as possible. The results showed that the cueing effect was positively correlated with the total performance in D-CAT, while the inhibition of return (IOR) effect was negatively correlated with that. These results suggested that the focused attention plays a role in visuospatial attention for older adults.

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