Two experiments were conducted to examine whether employing meaningful strategies to memorize information improves recall and recognition memory in young children. Children aged 4–6 years were required to remember the elements of four pictures depicting their daily lives. In Experiment 1, the participants were randomly assigned to four groups (coherent or incoherent pictures and with or without narrated story). The results indicate that the participants recalled a greater number of elements in the case of coherent pictures. Similarly, recall was better when a story was narrated while presenting the pictures. Protocol analysis indicates that meaningful strategies were spontaneously employed by five-and-a-half-year-olds in memorizing the information. In Experiment 2, four-year-olds were presented with incoherent pictures to investigate whether their scores would improve when they were instructed to derive some meaning from the pictures. When asked to narrate a story based on the pictures, their recall scores improved and were at a similar level to those of the five-year-olds. These findings suggest that instructing young children to use meaningful strategies for provided information can be effective in improving their recall.

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This study examines whether complexity and animacy of object movements induce increased gaze durations for the object and enhanced preference. We examine the effects of manipulating change frequency(1, 3, and 7 times)and change timing(constant and random)for object directions in Experiment 1A and speed changes(acceleration, deceleration, and mixed)for object movements in Experiment 1B. We also measure participant eye movements using an eye-tracker. In both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2A, the participants were allowed to freely move their eyes during stimulus presentation, but in Experiment 2B(control experiment), they were required to closely observe a fixation point. The participants were required to judge the movement of a black-bordered circle, presented for 8 seconds, in terms of its complexity, animacy, impression, interest, amusement, and preference. The results suggest that complexity and animacy of object movements increased participants' preferences for the object and evoked more active gazing. It was also found that the participants constantly tracked object movements throughout a trial and that there were differences in tracking strategies and in the number of gaze stagnations depending on acceleration of the movements.

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The mere exposure effect (MEE) refers to the phenomenon where repeated exposure to a stimulus results in an increased liking for that stimulus. When a shape is partly occluded, observers usually perceive the contours to be continuous (i.e., amodally completed) behind the occluders. This study investigates whether the MEE would occur primarily for amodally completed shapes (i.e., perceived shapes) or for physically input shapes. We used novel contour shapes as the stimuli, which were overlaid with square-wave grating occluders (i.e., stripes) of various widths. During the exposure phase of the experiments, 50%-occluded shapes were repeatedly presented to the observers. During the rating phase, the observers rated the likeability of the same 50%-occluded stimuli, non-occluded stimuli, and stimuli 50%-occluded by gratings that were half-cycle shifted. The results of three experiments showed a significant MEE only for the 50%-occluded stimuli that were presented exactly the same at both the exposure and the rating phases. Another experiment confirmed that these stimuli were indeed perceived as amodally completed. These findings indicate that the MEE for partly occluded stimuli occurs primarily to physically input shapes, not to perceived shapes.

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Darwinian aesthetics assumes that universal standards for facial attractiveness provide cues to mate quality. Despite the claim that male the masculinity of male faces signals mate quality, previous studies have revealed that females do not necessarily find masculine faces so attractive. Based on the findings of two studies, we argue that this is partly because both females and males tend to perceive masculine faces as threatening. Studies 1 and 2 indicate that perceptions of anger and/or threat from masculine male faces elicit ratings of such faces as being less attractive. However, in Study 2, when females looked at masculine male faces with neutral expressions, they tended to prefer indirect gazes over direct gazes. These findings suggest that the biological and fitness-related goals that are common to both males and females and those that are not shared may have different influences on the attractiveness ratings of masculine male faces.

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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. It has been suggested that the act of comparing among items in the self-choice condition is necessary for the self-choice effect to emerge (Itoh, Ayabe-Kanamura, & Kikuchi, 2012), but it is also possible that semantic characteristics accessed within the comparison process could facilitate memory (i.e., a levels-of-processing effect). During the incidental-study phase of our experiment, participants made comparisons of two words based on either semantic-level or non-semantic-level characteristics or made judgments about a single word at either a semantic-level or non-semantic-level. Recall performance showed a levels-of-processing effect for both conditions. More importantly, the performance results indicated a facilitating effect of making a comparison regardless of the level-of-processing. These results suggest that making comparisons between items during selection, rather than level-of-processing alone, contributes to the self-choice effect on memory.

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