When drinking a beverage, we evaluate its taste taking into account the surrounding sensory information （sensation transference）. In this study, we focus on brand personality （BP）—human personality traits applied to the impressions evoked by a brand’s characteristics and concept—to investigate whether BP can facilitate sensation transference from the tactile thickness of a container to the taste of a beverage. Assuming that the thinness of a container’s opening and the bitterness of a beverage are both associated with high arousal, we hypothesize a thinness-bitterness transfer to be facilitated by activating similarly high levels of arousal due to BP （an excitement dimension）. Experiments 1 and 2 showed a significant association between a visually perceived thin-lip mug and excitement. In Experiment 3, when participants imagined being in a café with an excitement dimension, they anticipated the bitterness of the coffee in a thin mug to be stronger than when no BP was evoked. These results indicate that BP is associated with the thickness of a mug’s lip and that sensation transference from a mug to the anticipated taste of the coffee in a mug may be evoked by a shared arousal representation.

This study investigates whether having a humanoid robot conduct an experimenter might reduce evaluation expectations and enhance participant creativity. In Experiment 1, 36 university students generated extraterrestrial creatures. Unexpectedly, participants with high anxiety for negative evaluations （i.e., trait evaluation anxiety） exhibited lower originality when the experimenter was a robot （robot group） compared to a human experimenter （human group）. To explore the underlying reasons, we conducted interviews. The results suggest that the participants with high evaluation anxiety felt more at ease with the robot experimenter and exerted less effort to improve their originality, but their efforts were prompted by the possibility of a human experimenter evaluating their work and by unclear evaluation criteria. In Experiment 2, the task was changed to a divergent thinking task with clearly defined evaluation criteria, and a similar experiment was conducted with 105 university students. The results showed that the robot group exhibited less tension and better performance than the human group. This study indicates that differences in the type of experimenter and the nature of the task have different effects on participants’ evaluation expectations and creativity.

In this study, we adopt a longitudinal observational approach to examine teaching behavior of young children at a daycare center in Tokyo. Previous studies have largely focused on young children as learners under the guidance of adults, but, in this study, we regard young children as active participants within the teaching process. As a volunteer assisting in the care of three- to five-year-old children, the first author recorded instances of instructional interactions among peers and adults. The findings reveal that much of the instruction was spontaneously initiated by the children themselves. Such instruction encompassed declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and rules, with instruction strategies ranging from verbal explanations to demonstrations. Natural pedagogy theory posits that adults employ ostensive cues when communicating with infants （e.g., attentional speech, pointing, and other gestures）, but this study found that such cues are frequently used by children. These findings suggest that children possess a capacity to act as competent instructors from an early preschool age.

The psychological anthropomorphism of robots is key to determining how humans treat robots. Accordingly, this study aims to verify whether robot tears promote psychological anthropomorphism. Tears were digitally added to images of robots to produce versions both with and without tears that were used as visual stimuli. In Study 1, participants were presented with the robot images and asked to respond concerning the robots’ Sociability, Agency, Animacy, and Disturbance. The results showed that tears increased Animacy ratings, but no changes were observed in the other variables. In Study 2, participants were presented with the robot images and short scenarios describing the robots’ situations (death or farewell) and were asked to answer the same questions as in Study 1. The results showed that tears increased Animacy, Sociability, and Agency. Thus, these results indicate that robot tears may promote psychological anthropomorphism, but they also suggest that context is important for this effect. These findings suggest that Animacy is a fundamental aspect of psychological anthropomorphism.

This study proposes a rigorous method to control the size of visual stimuli for online psychological experiments. Our method employs ruler-based calibration to estimate the on-screen millimeter-to-pixel ratio by applying the least squares method to repeated measurements made by participants of randomly generated line segment lengths. Calibration success can be objectively verified by assessing both measurement errors during the test phase and the residual variance of a linear regression model. Our simulation results demonstrate that an upper bound of the standard deviation of estimation errors was 0.007 mm/px under the proposed calibration criteria. Demonstrating the method’s feasibility, implementation results showed that the majority of participants (N=100) were able to complete calibrations within a few minutes. Our method may facilitate rigorous studies of psychological phenomena that are sensitive to visual-stimulus size, such as visual perception and cognition, conducted in online environments. A demo and a JSON file for implementing the method with lab.js are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/zeyxp.

In this study, we focus on everyday situations seeking to explore the relationship between perceptions of gazing at others （watching） and perceptions of being gazed at （being watched） in different developmental stages among junior high-school, high-school, and university students. A questionnaire was administered to 285 junior high-school, 285 high-school, and 308 university students. We investigate the relationship between perceptions of watching and of being watched and the feelings of discomfort at such times, as well as differences across these developmental stages. The results revealed positive correlations between experiences of watching, of being watched and eye contact at all developmental stages, indicating a relation between gaze perceptions. Experiences of watching were also higher than those of being watched, and the feelings of discomfort due to perceptions of being watched were higher than those of watching. Moreover, university students exhibited higher perceptions of watching and feelings of discomfort when they experienced being watched compared to the junior-high and high-school students.

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a phenomenon in which an individual, when processing graphemes （letters or characters）, not only processes such information in a general way （e.g., graphemes are recognized as graphemes）, but also experiences an impression of colors. It is a cognitive trait （characteristic of information processing） thought to be possessed by a small percentage of the population. This paper reviews and introduces the authors’ research on Japanese grapheme-color synesthesia, which received the 2023 Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology “Dokuso-sho” （Award for Original Studies）. We believe our research is original, especially in that it clarified the determinants of the associations between graphemes and synesthetic colors by utilizing the characteristics of the Japanese language, which employs a diverse range of scripts and characters. We also discuss the social significance of our synesthesia research. Promoting the findings of scientific studies in this field will help the general public gain a better understanding of synesthesia.