This study investigated the relationship between autism-spectrum quotient and self and other face recognition. To examine the strength of attention to detail for self-faces, sixty-five undergraduate and graduate students answered a seven point scale on "how much the face looked like their own" for their unmodified, and four types of modified self-faces. Similarly, to examine the strength of attention to detail for other faces, the same participants viewed unfamiliar faces in a ten second video and then answered a seven point scale on "how much the face resembled the presented face" for unmodified and four types of modified other-faces. Subsequently, the participants completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire (AQ). The results showed that the high AQ group showed a significantly lower evaluation value for "how much the face looks like their own" for the modified self-face compared to the low AQ group, but no significant difference was observed between the high and low AQ groups for "how much the presented face looks like the others" for modified other faces. In other words, Autism Spectrum affects the strength of attention to detail regarding one's own face, but does not affect attention to detail regarding other faces.

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This study investigated the effect of familiarity on the self–other discrimination task of face recognition using morphed images of the participant's own face and the face of other people (same-sex friend or unknown), as well as the effect of wearing a mask, which is a habit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants performed the self–other discrimination task in four experimental sessions: (morphing between self and friend, morphing between self and unknown) x (with and without masks). Fifteen morphed images were used in the experiment, varying in the ratio of self. The result showed that the threshold (the ratio of self in the morphed image where the performance of self/other discrimination task is at chance level) was lower in the morphed image condition with the friend than that with the unknown.

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The concept of time is not only represented by concrete objects such as clocks and calendars and language, but also by spontaneous gestures. Previous research has shown that when discussing temporal relations between, speakers use linear or circular gestures to express temporal relations. It is also known that such gestures influence the temporal representations of listeners who observe them. However, as time moves in a specific direction, the present study manipulated not only the shape but also the direction of the speaker's gestures to investigate their impact on the listener's understanding of temporal relations. The results showed that observers who saw linear gestures tended to perceive the flow of time from left to right, regardless of the direction of the gesture, while observers who saw circular gestures were affected by the direction. This is thought to be due to the strong influence of cultural conventions that associate the flow of time from left to right in the correct direction.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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We examined the types and frequency of self-touching behaviour during natural conversations. Self-touching behaviour refers to the behaviours of touching parts of one's own body with one's own hands, such as touching one's hair or rubbing one's arm. It is a common occurrence during conversations and has been shown to reduce stress levels. While Sugawara (1987) observed self-touching behaviours in naturalistic situations, the number of participants and observation situation were not controlled. As such, the present study aimed to investigate self-touching behaviour in conversational situations where gender and group size were controlled. We analyzed 12 groups of friends to identify the body parts touched by hands and the frequency of the touches during the conversation. The results revealed gender differences in the body parts touched, with women touching their hair and mouth more frequently and men touching their nose and hands more frequently.

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[in Japanese]

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To explore temporal changes in risk perception and collective emotions about COVID-19 over time, a web-based to-wave panel survey of men and women aged 18-89 years (M=44.7) nationwide was conducted in January 2021(N=1007), April 2022(N=618) and February 2023 (N=820). The questions on individual/collective emotions asked respondents to answer whether self/society in general had nine emotions (e.g., anxiety) about 12 COVID-19-related targets (e.g., patients). Other questions asked about perceived risk of COVID-19, vaccination frequency, mask use, etc. The results of 2021 and 2023 showed that for individual/collective emotions, the proportion of responses for anxiety about COVID-19 (49%/49 % to 36%/36%) was high in both cases and significantly decreased in 2023. Gratitude for health care workers (84%/80% to 60%/57%) was slightly higher for individuals and significantly decreased in 2023. On the other hand, collective emotions rather than individual emotions was higher for anxiety about patients (35%/43% to 29%/22%) and anger about those who do not use masks (36%/54% to 18%/22%) and the prime minister (29%/40% to 22%/23%). All of these decreased significantly in 2023, and the individual-collective emotions gap also narrowed.

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Awe is an emotional response to vast stimuli transcending the current schema (e.g., beautiful nature). Previous studies on the relationship between awe, curiosity, and creativity have focused on the between person relation, but have not investigate on the within person relation. In the present research, we measured twenty-something people’s dispositional awe, curiosity, and creative self at two points with a four-month interval and examined the relationship between change in each variable within individuals using a latent change score model (N = 257; mean age = 26.10, sd = 3.17, 183 females). Mediation analysis using bootstrapping methods (N = 10,000) indicated that change in dispositional awe positively predicated change in curiosity, which in turn positively predicated change in creative self (indirect effect: b = 0.18, 95%CI [0.09, 0.29]). The result of the present study suggests that awe promotes creativity through increased curiosity, from the perspective of within person change.

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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 study, we investigated whether the senses of agency and body ownership are also influenced by movement intention and its achievement state. In Experiment 1, in order to examine a relationship with a movement intention of grasping, we compared both the senses in the manipulation task which participants grasped and manipulated an object in a virtual space and the pantomime task which participants performed the same action as the manipulation task without displaying the object. In Experiment 2, we compared both the senses of the success condition displaying the scene that the movement intention was achieved in many trials, and the failure condition displaying the scene that in many trials the intention was not achieved. These results indicate that the movement intention to grasp an object influenced the senses of agency and ownership, and moreover the senses are also affected by its achievement state.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Face memory has been examined using recognition tasks. Although this can examine whether people have face memories, it is difficult to reveal how to represent them. To address it, the reverse correlation method has recently been applied. This study employed it and investigated the derogation effect on face memory, in which women with romantic partners are less sensitive to male attractiveness than those without partners. In the experiment, participants memorized an attractive/unattractive face and judged which of the two noisy faces they had memorized. Based on the judgments and noises, memory representations were reproduced, and different participants rated them. The results showed that women with romantic partners had lower attractiveness sensitivities not only to males but also to females. Furthermore, different from women, men with romantic partners showed higher attractiveness sensitivities. This suggests that the reverse correlation method can provide evidence of individual biases in face memory representations.

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[in Japanese]

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Even though color sensitivity of the peripheral visual field is relatively poor, we subjectively experience the world in rich color. One possibility is that our daily experience of an environment makes our visual system capable of complementing the colors in our peripheral vision that we do not see. (Balas & Sinha, 2007; Cohen et al., 2020). To extend this possibility to memory functions as well, we hypothesized that the chromatic region in scene images may expand to region not physically presented in a memory recall task. Participants were asked to memorize scene chimeras with different sizes of chromatic central and achromatic peripheral regions. After 5 minutes break, they were asked to recall the chromatic central region using the method of adjustment. Results showed that participants recalled the spatially expanded color region, the degrees of color expansion depend on the size of the central chromatic region.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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This study tests the distinction between Westerners’ low-context culture and Easterners’ high-context culture using two measures: the acceptance of enthymeme compared to its syllogism and the sensitivity to the familiar major premise that is implicit in enthymemes. This study investigated whether Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, French, and British participants preferred an enthymeme to its syllogism, and whether they were sensitive to the familiarity. Participants were given a syllogism (Modus Tollens type) and enthymeme and were asked to rate them on a 7-point scale based on which was more persuading, logical, natural, poetic, and wise. Results show that Easterners did not prefer enthymemes to syllogisms more than Westerners; however, the sensitivity to familiarity was greater among the Japanese, Koreans, and French. Japanese, Korean, and French languages are grouped into high-context languages. Sensitivity to familiarity is influenced by language characteristics.

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People adaptively use various judgmental strategies based on situations and make accurate judgments. This framework is called an adaptive toolbox. In this study, using mouse tracking approaches, we investigated differences in judgmental processes between heuristic users and knowledge users in a binary choice task. We first estimated judgmental strategy that each participant might use through model-based approaches. As a result, heuristic was often used in difficult questions. We next investigated each participant’s cursor trajectories during choice behaviors. We found that both heuristic users and knowledge users quickly moved a mouse from the beginning of tasks, but heuristic users tended to amend their judgments right before the final choice. It is expected that our findings will extend the adaptive toolbox framework in terms of judgmental processes under which people use their strategies.

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In human memory, various negative aspects, such as forgetting, exist. However, previous studies have shown that such negative aspects can be understood as adaptive processes in terms of the nature of real-world environments and human cognitive constraints. In the current study, we focused on one of the negative aspects of human memory, error, and analyzed the process about how the error generates. Specifically, we analyzed the relationship between the pattern of memory errors for real-world objects (e.g., judgment that a high court exists in Yokohama city) and the probabilistic nature of the environment (e.g., in which city a high court exists with high probability). We found that memory error patterns were not constant depending on objects. In addition, the error pattern was highly correlated with the probabilistic natures of the real world. These results suggest that memory errors for the real-world objects are generated from the human adaptive probabilistic inferences under high uncertainty.

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[in Japanese]

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Since fake news has become a hot topic in recent years, studies have investigated the mechanism of spreading misinformation on social networking service, SNS.
Fake news spread explosively in SNS; an environment different from that of mass media. Besides the environment, the spread of fake news is believed to be related to emotions.
Many studies have long shown that the sharing of information with others is related to the emotions and feelings of both the sharer and receiver. Based on these studies, there has been a lot of research on the sharing of emotions and the diffusion of misinformation that arouses emotions on SNS.
The purpose of this study was to examine how the diffusion of misinformation that arouses emotions differs between SNS and mass media, based on previous studies.

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Recent advances in user interface of web browsers enabled users to alter playback speed during watching various types of video lectures and streaming services. Previous studies demonstrated that degree of comprehension in lecture content watched at 1.6x speed did not differ from that at 1.0x speed. The present study examined whether increasing playback speed caused any impacts on emotional aspect in mood evoked after watching short videos. Three types of emotional video conditions (anger, sadness, and joy) were employed. Participants watched one of the three types of emotional videos at 1.0x or 1.6x speed and reported valence and arousal level by using the Affect Grid before/after video watching. For each emotional video condition, no main effect of playback speed was observed by 2 (playback speed: between-subjects) x2 (before/after: within-subjects) mixed subjects ANOVAs on valence or arousal level. These results indicate that speed watching does not impair viewing emotional experience.

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[in Japanese]

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There are a wide variety of objects described as cute. However, the emotions aroused by cuteness have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we compared the emotions evoked by various cute objects. The objects were selected with baby schema (BS), without baby schema (NBS), self-selection (SC), and neutral. To assess these objects, subjective ratings (16 items) and four facial movement action units were measured. We also examined the relationship between the evaluator's empathicy traits and affective arousal. "Kawaii" was evaluated significantly higher by all participants, and "tender emotion" and "exciting" were evaluated significantly higher by the people in the SC and BS groups than by those in the neutral group. Corrugator supercilii activity was increased in SC and BS, and Orbicularis oculi and Buccinator activity were increased in SC. Regarding personal characteristics, there was an association between susceptibility and "kawaii", and ease of empathy and "heartwarming sensation”.

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Previous studies have shown inconsistent results regarding the effects of background music (BGM) on task performance. Ichimura, Hirai, and Mizuno (2022) suggested that self-choice of BGM could enhance intrinsic motivation regardless of musical elements. The current study manipulated the emotional valence of the music (happy vs. sad conditions) to examine whether the self-choice effect is observed equally under both conditions. We conducted an online experiment with 148 university students assigned to either the happy or sad condition. Participants performed a sustained attention task under three conditions: self-choice BGM, randomly selected BGM, and no BGM. The results showed a main effect of BGM on intrinsic motivation, with higher scores in the self-choice condition, followed by the random and no BGM conditions. However, we found no main effect of emotional valence or interaction. We suggest that the self-choice of BGM has a more significant impact on intrinsic motivation than emotional valence.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Value-directed remembering can improve learning of high-value information. However, it is unclear whether value can enhance memory of the binding of features of items. Yin et al. (2021) explored this issue by presenting colored stimuli with high or low value and comparing the memory performance of a group instructed to remember only the stimuli to that of a group instructed to remember both the stimuli and colors. The results showed that value enhanced memory of features only when binding was optimized. We conducted preregistered experiments to replicate Yin et al.'s (2021) Experiment 3a/b. We successfully replicated the original study's findings that value enhances memory of the stimuli themselves, regardless of the optimization of binding. However, our replication of the feature (color) of the stimuli was not entirely successful.

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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 the Go/No-go task, visual stimuli presented during the Go response are more likely to be recognized than those presented during the No-go response. Since even the No-go response promotes recognition compared to a non-action task, it is suggested that both action preparation and execution promote recognition. However, previous studies have not examined the effects of action preparation and execution separately. Therefore, the present study examined this using a modified Go/No-go task. In this task, the first cue, an image, and the second cue were presented sequentially. The first cue instructed participants whether to prepare for a Go response, and the second cue instructed participants whether to execute the Go response. A recognition task followed the modified Go/No-go task. Although we hypothesized that conditions, where the Go response was prepared or executed, would show better recognition performance for visual stimuli, Bayesian ANOVA provided evidence to reject this hypothesis.

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People remember a lot of information. Previous research showed that in visual working memory, people remember only 3 or 4 objects (Luck and Vogel, 1997). However, chunking is one way to retain more information because chunking can compress information (Gilchrist, 2015). Chunking happens when people are familiar with the information, or the information has perceptual characteristics; however, the chunking mechanism still needs to be fully understood (Gilchrist, 2015). This research aims was that perceptual chunking influences memory capacity in visual working memory tasks. Participants were adults, and we used color squares patterns using computers in working memory tasks. This research resulted in easy to chunk figures having a higher correct answer rate than difficult to chunk. Thus, easy to chunk is easier and more accurate to remember than difficult to chunk.

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[in Japanese]

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The influence of others on one's own actions has been clarified (e.g., Sebanz et al., 2003). The basis of this phenomenon is the formation of co-representations of other people's tasks. We investigated the effect of task-sharing on the memory encoding by correcting the procedural shortcomings of our previous study. A word category judgment task was conducted in an individual condition where participants performed the task alone, and in a joint condition in which they performed the task with a partner. In a subsequent surprise recall task, participants were required to recall all words presented on the screen regardless of category or social conditions. The results showed that the advantage in recall of partner-category over non-assigned category was observed only in the joint condition. This suggested the formation of co-presentations in task-sharing, and the possibility that encoding for the other category is done in the same way as for the self-category.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Prior research found that moral dilemmas read in a foreign language experience the Foreign Language Effect (FLE), where logical responses are favored more than in their native language. FLE is assumed to be caused by diminished mental imagery often observed in foreign language reading. The current study explores how mental imagery influences moral dilemma decision-making in a foreign language. Two groups were presented with a pre-posttest moral dilemma scenario in their second language. One group received mental imagery instruction before the second dilemma, while the other did not. The group that received the instruction showed a marginal increase in deontological choices in post-test conditions. The group also expressed a significant increase in the vividness of the moral dilemma characters post-test scenario. Based on the results, we argue that encouraging mental imagery could increase story immersion and deontological decisions despite the initially low imagery and FLE.

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[in Japanese]

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