People learn relations between two variables (e.g., height and weight or date and temperature) from everyday experiences or information transfer. However, people have a variety of cognitive biases and this is true for learning of relations. Kalish et al. (2007) showed that when learning relation between two variables, people have a strong inductive bias such as implicit assumption of a positive linear relation. This finding indicates that differences exist in difficulty of learning depending on the relation between two variables.In the present study, we conducted the knowledge transmission task used in Kalish et al. (2007) to analyze theoretically and experimentally the effect of inductive bias on learning absence of relation　between two variables. We found that participants did not learn the absence of relation between two variables well because of the inductive bias. In particular, participants people falsely found positive linear relation between two variables wherein no relation actually existed and this false cognition facilitate learning of relation between two variables.

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Placing larger bets on gambles that are more likely to lose than win is referred to as reckless betting. A previous study (Cummins et al., 2009) found that prior winning experiences in the Acey-Deucey Task prompted subsequent more reckless betting. The underlying mechanisms have remained unclear, however. The present study proposed a computational account of this phenomenon by modeling it as a process of predicting gambling outcomes based on agents’ prior winning experiences and a process of learning a betting policy with an objective of maximizing the expected compound effect. Data simulations assuming the same experimental settings as in the previous study reproduced the previous results; more risk-oriented policies were learned through prior many wins (i.e., more reckless after winning experiences), while more risk-aversive policies were learned through prior many losses (i.e., less reckless after losing experiences). Model fitting to artificial data generated with different sets of parameter values indicated generally good parameter recovery for all the model parameters except for the learning rate.

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In general, a negative association has been reported between an analytical cognitive style and religiosity. On the other hand, it is plausible that Easterners, known as dialectical thinkers, accept religiosity and its religious skepticism dialectically. British, French and Japanese people participated in the present web survey. They were given questionnaires on religiosity (the subscales were pro-religiosity, divine protection, and retribution), anti-religiosity, wisdom judgement on religious dialectic thinking, and thinking style (the subscales were preference for intuitive thinking (PIT), preference for effortful thinking (PET), actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and close-minded thinking (CMT)). An individual who agrees or disagrees with both religiosity and anti-religiosity is considered a religious dialectical thinker. We found that (1) the retribution score of the Japanese was higher than those of British and French, (2) the Japanese were more religious dialectical thinkers than British and French, (3) in general, the religious belief of the British and French was suppressed by AOT, whereas the religious belief of the Japanese was enhanced by PIT. We conclude that the suppression of religious belief by the analytic cognitive style is characteristic to Westerners, and that Japanese are more religious dialectical thinkers than Westerners.

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The sense of body ownership has been studied using full-body illusion (FBI). It has been shown that the FBI is less likely to induce a sense of body ownership in people with depersonalization tendencies who have difficulty feeling a sense of body ownership when they are made to view a fake body in VR as their own body in a top-down manner. In a case study of depersonalization, it has been suggested that the top-down cognition of the self-body as a negative state decreases the sense of body ownership, but this has not been examined. In the present study, we examined the effects of negative top-down cognition using an FBI procedure in which a fake body was instructed to be viewed as a negative self-body. Results showed that the FBI was inhibited when instructed to view it as a negative self-body. The present results indicates that top-down cognition may be a factor that inhibits the creation of a sense of body ownership.

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Harada et al. (2019) showed that younger adults tended to evaluate emotions in robot’s facial expressions more strongly than real human faces, whereas older adults tended to show weaker emotional intensity in their evaluation of robot’s facial expressions. This result may be due to age-related declines in the emotional evaluation of facial expressions. In this study, therefore, 20 older adult participants and 20 university students evaluated the emotions of each facial expression in the AIST facial expression database in two dimensions of the Affect Grid. The results showed that there were little changes in the overall emotion ratings by age group and that older people showed even stronger emotions, especially in positive facial expressions such as “joy” than younger adults. The results indicate that the differences between age groups in the evaluation of the robot’s symbolized emotional facial expressions are not due to a functional decline in the perceptual/cognitive processing of facial expressions due to pure aging.

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It has been shown that the objects we find cute are diverse, and the emotional expression when we find them cute is also various. In this study, we examined the effects of relational cognition and emotional state when interacting with cute objects on the emotions aroused by cute objects, such as approach motivation and muscle activity around the mouth and eyes. Regarding the relational cognition, 67% of all subjects in the preliminary survey selected children and pets, which they have direct contact with, as the "cutest object," more than characters and idols, which they mainly appreciate. In the experiment

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This study examined whether blonde hair is perceived as a minority in Japan among university students. Task 1 examined whether a bias exists that estimates the percentage of minority groups to be larger than the actual percentage. Face images of 100 Japanese were placed in a 10 x 10 square matrix, and the participants were asked to indicate the percentage of blonde and black hair in the matrix, respectively. The results of t-tests revealed that the proportion of black hair was significantly underestimated and the proportion of blond hair was significantly overestimated. This indicated that minorities were estimated more than they actually were. In Task 2, we investigated impressions of hair color. A factor analysis was conducted on the ratings, and two factors were extracted: a trustworthy factor and an extroversion factor. The participants also indicated that they had an opposite impression of blonde and black hair. The results of this study indicate the existence of a bias toward minorities in Japan.

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This study examines the impact of photograph background colors on the impression of individuals. An evaluative experiment was conducted using plain white and light pink and sky blue backgrounds, which are commonly utilized in identification photos. The findings suggest that the change in impression induced by background color varies according to the gender of the evaluator. Notably, a pink background enhanced the impression of femininity and attractiveness in women as judged by male evaluators. Conversely, it diminished these impressions when evaluated by females. This outcome partially replicates existing research that indicates a red background increases the attractiveness of women as perceived by male evaluators. It also suggests the involvement of new factors, such as a backlash against gender role stereotypes, in influencing these impressions.

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