In order for students to constructively interact for rebuilding their own thoughts with
peers, they should hold initial understanding of a topic before starting a discussion. The
initial understanding should consist of both concrete evidence and abstract summaries
that can be re-related to each other in discussion. This paper analyzed the effect
of scaffolding for constructing initial understandings in university. “Question-Answer
Tool” (Q-A tool) was provided to help students to extract structural elements such
as theme, experiment procedure, results, implications, and assertions from research
findings about cognitive science for a collaborative learning called“Dynamic Jigsaw. ”
Students explain research findings to each other and summarize multiple research find-
ings with their colleagues in the Dynamic Jigsaw. “ReCoNote” was also provided for
students. It imports the extracted elements into each student’s concept map to support
making relations among the elements. We compared 19 students who were supported
by the Q-A tool and ReCoNote in 2004 and 17 students who were only supported by ReCoNote in 2003 using design experiment paradigms to measure the effect of the Q-A
tool. All the concept maps and three explanations about research findings per group
were analyzed. The Q-A tool-supported students could describe implications and asser-
tions with appropriate evidence in their concept maps. In contrast, the non-supported
students could refer to evidence but not implications or assertions. Furthermore, the Q-
A tool-supported students described their original advanced implications drawn from
the research findings through making relations between the structural elements and
their original thoughts, and prepared summaries using two of the research findings by
comparing and relating the two research findings’ structural elements in constructive
interaction with peers.

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This study attempted to describe detailed observations of the actual process of ar-
chitectural design, which have been performed by a professional architect in Japan.
The observations were made on the basis of two surveys: a document survey and an
interview survey. The following results were obtained.
First, a proposal was composed of multiple modifications that emerged simultane-
ously under the different constraints. Second, the emergence of one modification could
lead to another, which was called the ‘linkage between modifications’. Third, the link-
age was observed not only at the level of the modifications, such as ‘making the ceiling
form like steps’ to the next modification ‘changing the ceiling height’, but also at the
level of proposals which were made at intervals of few days. The linkage at the proposal
level, which was called the ‘coupling of the modifications’, tended to include qualitative developments.
These results show that understanding the activities involved in architectural design
can be one method to pick-up and realise the potentialities of developing architectures
that are intrinsic to the building site and not merely a reflection of the architects ’
aesthetics,self-centredness or calculating activities. This issue might be worth dis-
cussing in connection with the concept of ‘dwelling perspective’, which was presented
in anthropology with an ecological perspective by Tim Ingold (2001).

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In the cognitive process when the viewers of narrative moving images appreciate its
world and deepen their consideration, is it “story” or “rhetoric” to take an impor-
tant role? This is the interdisciplinary point at issue cross-linking the domain where
study such as art, literature, rhetoric, and a problem of representation, and a problem
of cognitive-affective mechanism are connected with each other. Therefore this study
used two images — “Tower of TARO” and “YUMEJI” which represent the life of two
Japanese famous painters called Taro Okamoto and Yumeji Takehisa as materials, and
examined that problem. The theory to explain the cognitive process of the type in
pursuit of story development was enjoyment, and the theory to explain that of the type
to receive the effect of rhetoric was irrational cutting. Structured cognitive model of
enjoyment and irrational cutting was assumed. Participants were separated by story
group and rhetoric group, and the validity of the model and the structural difference of
each group between two images were examined by covariance structure analysis. The
results revealed that the model to be constructed only in enjoyment was adopted in
Tower of TARO, and the model to be constructed enjoyment and irrational cutting
was adopted in YUMEJI. In addition, it was suggested that the concept reconsider-
ation of story group tended to come under an influence of lines, and that of rhetoric
group tended to come under an influence of screens. Based on these results, the present
problem of art of narrative moving images was discussed generally.

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This paper reviews research on computational approaches to metaphor comprehen-
sion, and discusses some general issues on the study of language and cognition, i.e.,
embodied cognition and roles of computational models in research on language and cog-
nition. The reason for choosing metaphors as the topic of this paper is that metaphors
pervade language, involve intricately related processes, and provoke interdisciplinary in-
terests. Because of these features, computational studies of metaphor can provide many
useful insights into the characteristics and possible roles of computational models.

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