Because of the limitation of working memory processing, it is important to free up working memory. To examine forgetting of working memory through perceived cues, an experiment was conducted in which multiple dots were presented on the screen for a short time and a subset was moved. Participants were asked to estimate the number of dots that moved. The preceding studies revealed that the estimated number was smaller where motions of dots ended asynchronously than where motions ended synchronously. The present experiment compared two conditions with large and small numbers of moving dots to examine the strategy participants used to estimate the number of dots moved. Thirty-seven participants were randomly assigned to one of these conditions. In both conditions, underestimation was shown, indicating no effect of the strategy. These results suggest that forgetting in working memory is related to endings of motion and event segmentation.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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It is well known that when asking the location of landmarks on a map, distances between semantically related landmarks are recollected shorter than those between non-related landmarks (Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986), but a previous study (Thomas et al., 2012) reported that with older adults, those effects of semantic relatedness between landmarks were weak or none. However, in the tasks used in those previous studies, participants were simply instructed to memorize a map, which deviates from everyday situations of learning a map, like spatial/physical exploration, or exploring on a map. In the present study, with a new task to search for the specified targets on the maps, an experiment with 20 older- and 20 younger participants was executed, and the results showed that the effect of semantic relatedness on the distance estimation was clearly shown in both the younger- and older adults groups.

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[in Japanese]

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Orghian & Hidalgo (2020) revealed that faces partially occluded by noise increased attractiveness compared to faces without noises and interpreted this was because the lack of information was complemented by the average face with higher attractiveness. This study examined more in detail the possibility of average face completion. We conducted a Best Likeness task in which participants observed a face, then selected one they observed from a set of faces manipulated typicality (distance from the average face) of the face and, typicality of faces evaluation task. The presence or absence of noise in the faces being observed was manipulated. The results of the Best Likeness task showed that more highly typical faces were selected when observing faces with noise than without noises. However, there was no difference in the typicality ratings between with and without noise. The results suggest that average face completion occurs when observing faces with insufficient information.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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