In this study, speaker participants verbally explained a presented geometric figure to addressee participants who attempted to draw the figure. The addressees were allowed to ask questions and seek confirmations. The effects of the speakers' previous experiences in providing explanations (professional teachers, graduate students with teaching experience in schools, and graduate students with no teaching experience) on oral communicability were examined. To that aim, the differences between explanations that were correctly understood and those that were misunderstood were examined. The results indicate that speakers with more experience in providing explanations appropriately explained the figure to the addressees, such that they were able to correctly draw the figure. In the speaker–addressee pairs that produced the correct figure, speakers gave many instructions about how to draw the figure, provided meta-explanations, and asked questions about the drawn figure or the addressee's understanding of the speaker's explanations. The addressees in such pairs also provided more reporting about the drawing process and “yes” responses. Furthermore, teachers provided more meta-explanations than graduate students gave. Finally, the functions of the speaker and the addressee utterances within the oral communication are discussed.

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This study examines the characteristics of memories over long retention intervals with respect to autobiographical reasoning. A total of 641 participants, consisting of 315 undergraduate students, 166 school teachers, and 160 elderly adults, remembered an autobiographical memory relating to communication with teachers when they were junior-high-school students. Then, the participants were asked to rate 45 items, including 38 items from the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire, about autobiographical reasoning and memory characteristics. University students who had highly motivated orientation towards the teaching profession showed more autobiographical reasoning; they connected past events with their present selves and remembered the events as referential points. In addition, they remembered vivid and detailed memories. The elderly participants showed more autobiographical reasoning than younger participants and remembered more vivid and detailed memories. Positive events elicited more autobiographical reasoning than negative events. These results are mainly discussed in terms of aging and the emotional aspects of autobiographical reasoning. It is necessary to further explore autobiographical reasoning as it relates to everyday events.

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Previous studies have indicated that poor readers are less sensitive to phrase boundaries when reading texts than good readers. This study explores the causes of the difficulty in detecting phrase boundaries while reading English sentences from the perspective of Japanese speakers who may be regarded as less proficient readers of English. In the study, 40 undergraduate students read two kinds of center-embedded sentences—object relative (OR) and subject relative (SR) sentences—and normal sentences with and without phrase boundary cues that were signaled by slashes. The OR sentences were incompatible with a strategy of inferring sentence structure, which is believed to be a cause of the difficulty in detecting phrase boundaries. The results show that phrase boundary cues decreased reading durations and facilitated comprehension for OR sentences, while the cues did not have any significant effects on the SR or the normal sentences. Accordingly, it is argued that the detection of phrase boundaries within OR sentences is more difficult than within the other types of sentences, which indicates that the inappropriateness of the strategy of inferring sentence structure could be a factor for the difficulty in detecting phrase boundaries.

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The self-choice effect states that self-selected items are more likely to be remembered than items selected by an experimenter. This study examines whether the mere short-term retention of items during selection is sufficient or whether a comparison among items is required for the self-choice effect to manifest itself. In Experiment 1, during each selection, participants were assigned to one of four conditions; a forced-choice condition (only retain instructed item in short-term memory), a delayed-choice condition (retain all items in short-term memory), a compared-choice condition, and a self-choice condition. The recall rates of chosen items in the first two conditions showed no differences, but they were lower in the second two conditions. These results indicate that comparisons among items during the selection are necessary to facilitate later recall. In Experiment 2, both semantic and non-semantic comparison criteria failed to produce different recall rates. Thus, it is difficult to explain the facilitated recall rate within the compared-choice condition merely by semantic processing.

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The revelation effect refers to the phenomenon whereby engaging in a cognitive task before making a recognition judgment increases the probability of old responses. Twenty participants viewed 60 brand names and were asked to judge whether they had known these brands during junior-high school. In half of the trials, the participants judged each brand immediately after solving an anagram. The results showed that solving the anagrams increased old responses for fictitious brand names (false alarms); that is, the revelation effect occurred. In contrast, the effect did not occur for brand names that had existed when the participants were at junior-high school. Given that conscious recollection of fictitious brand names is logically impossible, these findings are consistent with the view that the revelation effect occurs when judgments rely not on recollection but on familiarity processes. The fact that the revelation effect is most noticeable for fictitious brand names suggests that this effect depends more on judgments based on prior knowledge about the brand than on judgments based on the time when the brand was learned.

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This study investigates size differences for own hand images and the actual hand, and the relation between size accuracy for imagined hand and own body information. The experimental task was to imagine either the participant’s hand or some non-body objects and adjust the width between two horizontal lines presented on a display to fit to the imagined object. Participants performed the task while changing hand position, posture and imaged hand region (Experiment 1) or at six different distances from the display (35–60 cm, Experiment 2). The findings were that estimates of hand-width were relatively accurately but hand-length tended to be overestimated, regardless of hand position or posture. Moreover, hand-size esti-mations were more affected than estimations of non-body objects by display distance, such that hand sizes were significantly underestimated at distances beyond the arm length of each participant. The results in-dicate that one's concept of own body size is not modulated by current information from the body but is modulated by long-term experience of one's own body.

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This study investigates the characteristics of autobiographical memory for purchases within younger and older adults using a questionnaire that includes items from the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ). The most memorable event concerning a purchase was chosen by each participant. The characteristics of the remembered events were mainly examined in terms of the participants' age and the retention intervals. The data from 394 undergraduates, as the younger participants (18–27 years), and 207 students at a senior college, as the older participants (55–87 years), were analyzed. The results indicate that the most memorable events for younger participants were likely to be from a recent period of several years. The older participants did not always remember purchase events from the period extending from the age of 10 years to 30 years; thus, a reminiscence bump was not observed. Moreover, positively-recognized events were more frequently remembered by both younger and older participants; thus, the assumption that positivity effects can only be found in older adults was not confirmed. These findings are interpreted with respect to the Self-Memory System (Conway, 2005) and the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, 2006).

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This study investigates how physician attitudes during verbal explanations concerning informed consent and the comprehensibility of the explanations influence understanding, emotions, and decision-making in patients of varying ages. After watching one of four videos providing verbal explanations of informed consent for lumbar puncture, 642 healthy participants were asked to evaluate the videos and undertake a post-explanation comprehension test. The videos varied on two dimensions: more/less comprehensible explanations and friendly/unfriendly physician attitudes. The results of the study indicate that patient understanding is primarily influenced by the comprehensibility of the verbal explanations. However, level of understanding was also affected by physician attitude, which was also the primary factor influencing the patient’s emotions during the encounters. The effects on decision-making varied according to age group; for although decision-making in young patients was affected by comprehensibility level, decision-making in middle-aged and older patients was more affected by physician attitude. Both comprehensible explanations and a friendly attitude are crucial for obtaining adequately informed consent.

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According to the conceptual distinctiveness hypothesis, the picture superiority effect (PSE) results from processing a picture’s conceptually distinctive features rather than its semantic features (Hamilton & Geraci, 2006). However, it is not clear whether the type of encoding task influences the type of features by which a picture is processed, or how the hypothesis applies to explicit memory. We investigate these questions by manipulating the type of encoding, stimuli, test cue, and retrieval intention. Participants studied pictures or words through naming (Experiment 1) or categorization (Experiment 2). Then, they received both an implicit and an explicit general knowledge test and were either provided with only semantic or conceptually-distinctive cues. In Experiment 1, the PSE occurred within the implicit test only for conceptually distinctive test cues, and within the explicit test regardless of cue type. In Experiment 2, the PSE did not occur in any condition. In conclusion, the findings of this study suggest that the use of conceptually distinctive information within pictures depends on the nature of the encoding task and the retrieval intention at test.

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This study examines whether the involuntary recollection of an autobiographical memory elicited from an odor cue is determined by cue identifiability, emotional valence, or frequency of everyday encounters. After a semantic-differential (SD) task for various odors, participants (N=74) were asked about occurrences of involuntary recollections during the SD task. The results revealed that more frequently encountered odors were more likely to trigger involuntary recollections. However, no effects were observed for identifiability or emotional valence. These findings suggest that odor cues induce involuntary recollections in a non-verbal manner and that the process of involuntary recollection varies according to cue type.

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