We examined the effects of central (product attributes) and peripheral (typicality of product name) information for products on product reliability, goodwill, and purchase desire. Products were categorized as being either highly-regarded or poorly-regarded in terms of motivation to obtain product information and evaluate. Thirty undergraduates participated in the experiment, consisting of a learning phase and an evaluation phase. The results indicate that both central and peripheral information facilitates the evaluation of products in both categories. Moreover, the results of path analysis, indicate that product attributes directly influence all measures, irrespective of category, while the typicality of a product's name directly affects only the level of reliability, implying that typicality indirectly affects attraction to and purchase desire for the product through product reliability. In the poorly-regarded category, the typicality of a product's name did not influence quality evaluations, although recall rates were higher for products with highly-typical names than for those with less-typical names in both categories.

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This study investigated whether or not recognition hypermnesia would occur based on the imagery hypothesis (Erdelyi & Becker, 1974; Erdelyi & Stein, 1981) and the alternative retrieval pathways (ARP) hypothesis (Kazén & Solís-Macías, 1999). Twelve university students were asked to study 30 pairs of droodle stimulus (in “label” conditions in Experiment 1 and 3, and “no-label” conditions in Experiment 2 and 4) and to undertake three successive recognition (Experiment 1 and 2) or recall (Experiment 3 and 4) tests. Although recognition hypermnesia was observed in Experiment 1, it was not found in Experiment 2, as both two hypotheses would predict. The result of Experiment 3 where recall hypermnesia occurred, is also consistent with predictions from both hypotheses. While the ARP hypothesis predicts no recall hypermnesia in Experiment 4, the imagery hypothesis does not. The absence of recall hypermnesia in Experiment 4 therefore supports the ARP hypothesis rather than the imagery hypothesis. In conclusion,when there are no ceiling effects, recognition hypermnesia for meaningful pictures is a reliable phenomenon, and the findings from this study support the ARP hypothesis.

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We have used a new method for evaluating the “musicality” of the pitch contours in emotional speech. The method involves two steps: (1) a fully automatic technique for extracting the dominant frequencies in an utterance using a “cluster” algorithm, and (2) evaluation of musical dissonance for all tone pairs, musical tension and modality of all tone triplets, using a psychophysical model of harmony. The model does not rely on musical scales, but rather on the relative size of pitch intervals, and is, therefore, applicable to both musical phenomena and speech intonation. In a study using the speeches consisting of “emotional” sentences, we found that utterances with positive affect had a greater major-chord-like modality and utterances with negative affect had a greater minor-chord-like modality. We conclude that the study of “pitch combinations” within intonation research may be useful for identifying the positive or negative affects of speech on the basis of pitch information.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the development of time processing abilities and the hierarchy of representations for daily activities. Participants were aged 4 to 9 years (N=89). To examine time processing abilities, a card arrangement task was administered, and the children were interviewed about daily activities, to investigate the hierarchy of representations for daily activities. The results were as follows: (1) Processing ability for verbal lists are acquired before processing ability of the image system. (2) Older children have more hierarchical representations for daily activities. (3) The development of time processing abilities and the development of hierarchical representations for daily activities progress parallel. Moreover, these findings suggest that the interval comparison tasks-original task in this study-are effective for measuring time processing abilities.

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This study investigates the relationship between the psychophysical and semantic features of shapes. We created 32 shapes by varying the magnitude of shape parameters that correspond to the four psychological dimensions of curvedness, regularity, complexity, and open/closed—referred to here as psychophysical features. These shapes were evaluated using the semantic differential method. Factor analysis extracted the three factors of mildness, stability, and activity—which we refer to as semantic features of shapes. Strong relations were identified between the following psychophysical and semantic features: curvedness and mildness, regularity and stability, as well as complexity and activity. However, the fourth psychophysical feature of open/closed was not related with any of semantic features. Moreover, psychophysical features influenced perceived shape impressions to varying degrees. While curvedness has the strongest influence, regularity and open/closed has the weakest influences. These results also support the reliability of the three psychological dimensions extracted by Oyama & Miyano (1999) with a different set of shapes.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the cognition of equal distribution within preschoolers, where children were asked to share out wooden chips. The children were divided into two experimental groups (a quotient and a divisor group), based on the instructions provided. In the trials, each child was given six wooden chips to share out, the instruction for the quotient group was to “divide the chips into twos, while the instruction for the other group was to “divide the chips by three”. A total of 128 preschool children, aged from three to six years, participated in the study, with half being assigned to the respective groups. The results indicated that children in the quotient group performed better than those in divisor group at all age levels. These findings suggest that while quotient instructions facilitate equal distributions, it might be difficult for young children to understand the phrase “divide by X”.

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We frequently observe occasions when breathing is intentionally controlled to match to concurrent body movement. This study reports on two experiments conducted to examine the stability and variability in the coordination of breathing with wrist-movements, with an inverted pendulum held in the hand. In Experiment 1, two modes of stable coordination of breathing and wrist-movement were identified: (1) the wrist was radially-flexed during inspiration and ulnarly-flexed during expiration; and (2) the wrist was ulnarly-flexed during inspiration and radially-flexed during expiration. In Experiment 2, subjects coordinated breathing and wrist-movements as three factors (phase mode, oscillatory frequency of breathing/wrist-movements, the eigen frequency of the pendulum) were manipulated. The results indicated that the coordination of breathing and wrist-movement exhibits patterns predicted by HKB-equation (e.g., phase transitions from the intended phase mode to the unintended mode). We suggest that breathing and wrist-movement together constitute a self-organizing system and that they are governed not only by the central nervous system but are also constrained by dynamical principles.

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The present study examines the visual scanning patterns of experienced archaeologists in order to understand the cognitive skills involved in identifying artificial objects. Twelve participants-nine with varying levels of archaeological experiences, ranging from introductory to advanced, and three with no archaeological experience-took part in the experiment, which monitored their eye movements, using eye camera (EMR model 8), while they observed either pottery as an experimental stimulus or an industrial flower pot as a control stimulus. The results indicated the following: a) the skilled experts fixated their eyes more frequently on the general outlines of the objects than the novices and naïve participants, and b) experts exhibited longer inter-fixation distances and short fixations durations than novices and naïve participants. It is suggested that expert archaeologists pay greater attention to morphological features and proportional aspects when observing objects.

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Why are people susceptible to biases when they make probability judgments? This study explores the thinking processes involved in such judgments and er-examines the mental model of probability (Itoh, 1995), corresponding to the conceptual model of probability (Hawkins & Kapadia, 1984). Creating a set of problems that people are likely to encounter in their daily lives and that require probability judgments to solve them, this study asked participants to write freely about their grounds for and the consequences of their predictions. Analysis of the responses identified four ways of judging probability: (1) use of basic mathematical probability laws, (2) misuse of basic mathematical probability laws, (3) use of arithmetic, and (4) use of fortune. These results suggest that people have a cognitive framework consisting these four patterns, and that biases arise from the use of the last three patterns. It is proposed that the division of these judgment patterns resembles a form of allocation system within a multi-modular mind.

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This study investigates the relations between physical features, impressions, and recognition memory for faces. The stimuli were pictures of male and female faces. Firstly, after measuring the sizes, lengths, and angles of physical features for the faces, a principal components analysis was conducted. Second, 108 university students evaluated their impressions of the faces with the semantic differential method, and a factor analysis was made. Third, 80 university students undertook a recognition memory task for the faces. Finally, analyses of correlations, partial correlations, and ANOVA were carried out on the principal component scores of the physical features, the factor scores for impressions, and recognition performance. The results of the analyses indicated that (a) impressions of facial uniqueness based on the eyes and eyebrows facilitated recognition memory, while (b) the physical features of small mouth and round jaw facilitated recognition memory for the faces.

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