The aim of this study is to explore differences in the use that native English and native Japanese readers make of visual and phonological codes in processing phonograms. In Experiment 1, the authors conducted, both in the US and in Japan, the letter-matching experiments of Posner, Boies, Eichelman, and Taylor (1969) after modifying several problematic aspects with the procedures. In contrast to their earlier experimental results, our results showed that reaction time (RT) for letters with a physical match did not increase as a function of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) and that mean RT in the physical match condition was shorter than that in the name match condition in Japan, although they were similar in magnitude in the US. These findings suggest that, for letters with a physical match, Japanese readers use visual codes while English readers use phonological codes. Experiment 2 employed an irregular letter-matching task devised to inhibit the use of the phonological code. The results showed that the mean RT in the physical match condition was shorter than that in Experiment 1 for English readers, although no such tendency was observed for Japanese readers, indicating that English readers largely depend on phonological codes while Japanese readers depend on visual codes in processing phonograms.

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First- and second-graders in Tokyo (M=7 : 4, range=6 : 5-8 : 3, 20 girls, 18 boys) and their mothers participated in this study. The children did not fully accept the possibility of psychogenic bodily reactions such as tension-related stomach pains. The children's performance concerning psychogenic items was correlated with self-reported personal experiences of psychogenic bodily reactions, but not with maternal reports about the children's previous experiences. The children who reported about their previous experiences of psychogenic bodily reactions were more likely to refer to vitalistic or mechanic explanations when explaining how mental states could cause bodily reactions. Even when the mothers suggested mental problems, such as anxiety, worry, fear, or shyness, as causes for the children's previous bodily reactions, the children seldom considered psychological causes, but rather hypothesized bodily causes, such as having a cold. These results seem to suggest that many first- and second-graders do not possess a framework that allows them to contemplate psychological causes for bodily reactions.

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Retrieval-induced forgetting research suggests that the act of remembering can lead to forgetting for related items in memory. In this paper, three experiments are conducted to examine the roles of response criteria and recollective processes in retrieval-induced forgetting. In category-plus-stem-cued recall, participants were asked to recall studied items with (Exp 1b) or without (Exp 1a) a strict response criteria instruction that required them to respond only when they were very confident. Retrieval-induced forgetting was observed only when the strict response criteria instruction was given. In order to separate the contributions of recollection and familiarity, the remember/know procedure was used. An inhibitory effect was found only in remember judgments, while know judgments were relatively unaffected (Exp 2). These results suggest that inhibitory processes may influence active recollection processes.

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This study examines the relationship between schizotypy and the integration of audio-visual information. Schizotypy may be characterized as a predisposition to schizophrenia. The altered functional connectivity hypothesis explains schizophrenia as a disorder resulting from a failure in proper functional integration within the brain. People with schizotypal traits may also have deficits in terms of information integration for different functions. This study with a dynamic-ventriloquism task, which requires the integration of information from different modalities, indicates that high schizotypal participants were less affected by visual information. Moreover, depressive and anxiety tendencies were found to be unrelated. Thus, the results from this study suggest that people with schizotypal traits experience difficulties in information integration.

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This study investigates the effect of attention in the detection of direction changes when there are multiple objects. The participants were asked to detect direction changes while allocating their attention to objects marked by cues. Specifically, this study investigates how attention benefits change when attention must be allocated to multiple objects in order to detect direction-changes. The results showed that detection rate was in an inverse proportion to the number of objects, suggesting that it is difficult to simultaneously allocate attention to a large number of objects. The mechanisms for detecting direction-changes are discussed in terms of attention allocation.

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This study investigates the effects of motion on the recognition of emotional facial expressions. Facial motions that express emotions have two aspects: configuration changes from a neutral face to the full-blown expression and temporal information, including dynamic changes. Sixty participants were presented with three types of facial stimuli. Dynamic faces included only temporal information and static faces were presented in a full-blown expression. First-last faces were constituted from a neutral face and a full-blown static face. These facial stimuli consisted of eight kinds of emotions (lively happy, relaxed, surprised, sleepy, fearful, angry, and sad) according to a dimensional perspective. The participants evaluated each of the facial stimulus items according to three methods: the Affect Grid (Russell, Weiss, & Mendelsohn, 1989), the forced choice task and Likert's method (Likert, 1932). The results showed that recognition for low-activation emotional faces (sleepy, sad, and relaxed) was facilitated by temporal information, while recognition of high-activation emotional faces (surprised, angry, and happy) was influenced by the presentation duration of full-blown expressions.

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The ability to interpret emotional cues has been argued to play an important role in maintaining successful relationships and healthy psychological functioning. Here, we focus on the comprehension of emotional expressions in the eyes. The ability to recognize complex emotions and mental states from the eyes relates to the ‘theory of mind’. This study investigates the judgment of happy expressions in the eyes. We created a composite stimulus by combining the region of the eyes from faces expressing one emotion (i.e., neutral) with parts from other faces expressing different emotions (i.e., happiness). The results suggest that the recognition of pleasure in the eyes is influenced not only by the eye region but also by other facial areas; a hallmark of holistic face processing. This effect was particularly noticeable for the the mouth area of the face.

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Mood congruent memory refers to the phenomenon of facilitated encoding for material that is congruent with mood. This study investigates mood congruent memory using autobiographical and modified autobiographical recall tasks. Ninety participants were randomly assigned to three types of mood-induced groups (positive, negative and neutral). Moods for the positive and negative mood groups were induced by listening to music. Participants in each condition were presented with 30 pleasant and 30 unpleasant trait words at 4s intervals. In the autobiographical recall task, the participants generated episodes corresponding to the stimulus items and made recognition judgments about whether or not they had experienced such an episode. In the modified autobiographical recall task, the participants rated how difficult it was for them to generate episodes of their own that correspond to the stimulus items. Mood congruent memory was observed in the positive and negative mood groups in the autobiographical recall task. The findings also suggest that the generation/recognition process or the recognition process alone is important for mood congruent memory.

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