This study investigated what kind of facilitation prompts are useful for collaborative learning on dyads explanation activities using concept maps. Based on the literature of collaborative problem studies in cognitive science and learning science, we focused on several types of utterances of collaboration and argumentation. In Experiment 1, we conducted a protocol analysis to investigate whether learners used schematic utterances of collaboration and argumentation during the task. Next, based on this analysis, we originally developed facilitation prompts and conducted a controlled experiment on the use of these prompts. The result showed learners who were facilitated in collaboration were higher than were not facilitated in collaboration and learners who were facilitated in argumentation were higher than were not facilitated in argumentation. Also, learners who were facilitated outperformed learners with the control condition where there was no facilitation prompt.

Given recent evidence that the visual shape of alphabetic characters such as “B” and “K” influences the bouba/kiki effect (Cuskley et al., 2017), it is interesting to rate and analyze the roundness-sharpness of characters in other languages. To address this issue, the present study experimentally rated the roundness-sharpness of Japanese Hiragana characters using Japanese-speaking, Japanese hearing-impaired, and English-speaking adults. The results showed significantly high correlations of roundness-sharpness ratings between all groups of participants, suggesting that in Japanese, character roundness-sharpness ratings are stable regardless of the amount of auditory input in Japanese. Moreover, in order to examine the roundness-sharpness of characters corresponded to nonsense words in previous bouba/kiki experiments, we analyzed the effects of consonants ([m], [n], [r] vs. [k], [t], [s]) and vowels ([u], [o] vs. [i], [e]) on character roundnesssharpness ratings. The participants of all groups showed significantly rounder ratings toward characters that corresponded to round related sounds ([m], [n], [r], [u], [o]) than sharp related sounds ([k], [t], [s], [i], [e]). These findings suggest a correspondence between the visual shape of characters and the visual figures of previous bouba/kiki experiments in terms of roundness-sharpness.

The purpose of this study was to examine the conception of learning and learning behavior for each goal orientation type from the multiple-goals perspective and to clarify the characteristics of each type. Questionnaires were conducted with fourth-year undergraduate students, and responses for 340 students were analyzed. We created four goal orientation types based on goal orientation combinations: <Low-goals>, <High-goals>, <High-Performance-Avoidance-goal>,and <High-Learning-goal> and examined conception of learning and learning behavior of each type. As a result, it was suggested that conception of learning and learning behavior differ depending on goal orientation type. <High-goals> tended to have multiple conceptions of learning, <High-Learning-goals> tended to have Active conception of learning, and <Low-goals type> and <High-Performance-Avoidance-goals> tended to have Passive conception of learning. It has been shown that the perception and learning behavior of <High-goals type> and <High-Leaning-goal type> are similar, we showed that these two types of the conception of learning are different and clarified the characteristics of each type.

It has long been believed that the Japanese are collectivists, whereas Westerners are individualists. Although this common view was found to be inconsistent with empirical evidence in many questionnaire and behavioral studies, it still derives credibility from Japanese researchers' intuitive interpretations of daily observations about Japanese culture. We investigated the validity of these interpretations in two questionnaire studies. As evidence of the common view, its advocates point out that Americans ask guests their respective preferences between drinks, whereas Japanese do not. In the first questionnaire study, Japanese and American undergraduates were asked how to choose drinks for guests. Contrary to the common belief, a majority of the Japanese respondents answered that they would ask guests' preferences. However, the proportion of asking was smaller for the Japanese respondents. In the second questionnaire study, Japanese and American undergraduates were asked what drink(s) to serve to guests. The answers from the Japanese respondents converged on Japanese tea, whereas those from the American respondents were scattered over a variety of drinks. This suggests that the proportion of asking was smaller for the Japanese respondents because they had the default drink for guests (i.e., Japanese tea), which had been established in Japanese history. In the first questionnaire study, the Japanese respondents did not endorse the intuitive interpretations of two Japanese words (i.e., hello and self) that Japanese researchers proposed as evidence of the common view. These results call attention to probable theoretical bias in researchers' intuitive interpretations of daily observations about their own culture.

The development of new types of small vehicles is accelerating. This requires us to create spaces where people and small automobiles can be together safely. In this study, we observed the interactions between small vehicles and pedestrians in an airport and a museum. Using these observations, we analyzed events, which contained either risks or risk-reducing behaviors. Results showed that there were two types of strategies for risk-reducing behaviors, compliance with the driving safety rules regarding mobility, and communication between the driver and surrounding pedestrians. When comparing the two strategies and their related factors, the importance of spatial design for both pedestrians and vehicles is revealed.

When we apply the theory of embodied cognition to the movement of a tongue while pronouncing the English sound units /l/ and /r/, does the performance to spell the English words including the English letters L and R? In order to examine this, we conducted an experiment in which twenty-four Japanese university students, whose English levels were defined as beginners, were randomly assigned to one of the following two groups: (a) participants who were trained to correctly pronounce the English sound units /l/ and /r/, and also who were asked to learn spelling out the English words including L and R by reading aloud—the pronunciation group, (b) participants who were asked to learn spelling out the same English words as shown by group (a) through circling all the letters L in blue, and all the letters R in red by a ball pointed pen—the color group. In order to examine what levels of difficulties of the English words would affect the performance of spelling words correctly, we set three levels of difficulties: easy, moderate, and difficult. The word spelling test revealed that the performance of the color group abated significantly, while the performance of the pronunciation group did not at the difficult level. This result suggests that the acquisition of pronouncing /l/ and /r/ correctly as a tongue movement can facilitate participants to spell the English words including L and R, at the difficult level, for the novice English students of Japanese speakers.

This study aimed to investigate how infants' object interactions changed during locomotor development, particularly concerning affordance perception. In this longitudinal study, we observed infants' daily activities in a daycare center for one year and examined their activities involving thin cloths in the room. Locomotor status and infants' activities were divided into several action categories. When they were crawlers or cruisers, the infants frequently engaged in stationary activities such as “object exploration” and “peek-a-boo” with their caregivers. After becoming independent walkers, most infants engaged more often in “wearing” & “carrying”. During the observation periods, the frequencies of social interactions were stable; however, after they could walk, most infants initiated social interactions more frequently. These findings suggest that locomotor development may be critical to the development of affordance perception of objects and that these developmental trends encourage infants to instigate social interactions.

This review article addresses behavioral synchronization between people, which is widely observed in daily communication. In particular, researchers have investigated the social function, cognitive processes, and mechanisms of behavioral synchronization from various perspectives. It is suggested that behavioral synchronization is one of the bases of human communication. However, researchers face difficulties in providing an overview of research on synchronization because previous studies have covered a broad range of topics. Furthermore, these studies have been subdivided and often include their own individually developed theories and methodologies. We categorized a vast range of existing literature into three research approaches to review synchronization studies and related research topics: 1) the social psychology approach, focusing on social factors and effects, 2) the cognitive approach, based on shared representation and predictive mechanisms, and 3) the dynamical systems approach, derived from the self-organization theory. We discuss their commonalities, differences, and mutual connectivity while considering the future direction of synchronization studies.

This article introduces the embodied cognitive view of language comprehension; especially, of the sentence comprehension. This view of research was started based on the criticism of the traditional cognitive sciences and was encouraged by the discovery of mirror neurons. Although many problems are still unanswered, extensive behavioral and neural research suggests that perceptual-motor simulation contributes towards the comprehension of words and sentences. Reading sentences causes the perceptual-motor simulation, which alters flexibly according to many factors, such as syntax, context,comprehension levels, knowledges, and perceptual-motor experiences of readers. The readers then construct the mental simulation with fragmented modal information and multimodal information.

The framework of embodied cognition, which claims that sensorimotor information is crucially involved in language comprehension, has made considerable contributions to the development of concept processing and word recognition research in recent decades. Current debates, however, have been criticized for the difficulty of fully explaining the characteristics of concept or sematic representations with this framework alone. In this brief article, I reviewed empirical studies of mental simulation in concept processing and word recognition based on the framework of embodied cognition, and presented criticisms for those studies. I then outlined some of the major models and theories of conceptual and semantic representations, including accounts of abstract concept representations, which have been widely discussed in recent years. These studies suggest that we should not examine whether concepts are embodied, but rather examine how they are grounded in diverse systems such as sensorimotor system, mental states, language system, environment, and context.

This article focused on the role of perceptual memory and autobiographical memory in the embodied story of text comprehension. Firstly, the reader's perceptual memory could contribute to the construction of mental representations, i.e., situation models, during story comprehension. Especially, the perceptual information in autobiographical memory is supposed to contribute to constructing situation models. Furthermore, because the accumulation of situation models forms a similar structure as autobiographical memory, it could share a cognitive process: vicarious experience of the real world. Therefore, story comprehension and autobiographical memory have strong connections as a kind of embodied cognition. Secondly, the accumulation of situation models throughout whole story reading has so unique feature that couldn't reduce each situation model of words or sentences, then become a fruitful target in the research about embodied cognition of language. Thirdly, developmental research possibly unites the cognitive processes of story comprehension, autobiographical memory, and the concept of the real world as a kind of embodied cognition.