Two experiments are reported examining how identity and orientation are perceived and employed for the purpose of orientation-invariant shape recognition. In Experiment 1, observers judged the degree of similarities between two-dimensional line patterns. There were three experimental conditions: shape-variable, transformation-variable, and shape-and-transformation-variable. Comparisons among the derived configuration of each condition revealed that shape and transformation are represented independently as separate perceptual similarity subspaces. Whereas shape refers to the categorical spatial relations of distinctive features necessary for identification, orientation, or transformation, is estimated from the absolute location of the orientation-informative feature within a perceived shape. Generally, such orientation-informative features are defined by structural properties. In Experiment 2, using a yes-no recognition memory task, it was shown that observers were more sensitive to the structural properties of the rotated line patterns compared to the upright line patterns. This indicated that orientation-transformation information that was perceived independently of shape-identity information biased the establishment of the canonical, or upright, form of the rotated pattern. The results of these two experiments suggested that the recognition system efficiently decomposed the perceived shape of an object into identity and orientation at the perceptual stage of recognition for the purpose of achieving orientation-invariance. The relation with recent findings in neuroscience is also discussed.

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In a requirements capturing meeting, the chair plays an important role. The chair presides the meeting and captures requirements. Roughly speaking, the process of requirements capture has two steps. In the first step, the chair extracts the clients' ideas as many as possible. In the second step, the chair integrates these ideas and captures requirements. The first step is indispensable in order to capture requirements through the second step.
In such a requirements capturing meeting, it is empirically known that the chair presides the meeting chiming in moderately in order to extract the clients' ideas. However, the relationship between chiming-in and the number of ideas is not known. We conducted an experiment to examine it.
The participants in the experiment were sixteen students (S₁,..., S₁₆) and one teacher (T), and each set of subjects consisted of two students (S_i, S_j) and the teacher (T). We had eight subject-sets. Before the experiment, the two students in each subject-set were supposed to decide the theme they would talk about; and, to have thought about the contents of their talk. In the experiment, they were supposed to talk about the theme to the teacher. For the half of eight subject-sets (called “Many Group”), the teacher chimed in as many as possible in a natural way. For the other half (called “Few Group”), the teacher chimed in only when the utterance terminated. The conversation was recorded with a tape-recorder, and transcribed to count the number of ideas.
The number of ideas had a statistical tendency to be larger in the Many Group than in the Few Group. In addition, the ideas from the Many Group had a stastistical tendency to be more well-formed than those from the Few Group.
Our experimental finding is that the chair in a requirements capturing meeting should chime in moderately to get more ideas, and more well-formed ideas.

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Saito & Tsuzuki (1989) investigated transcription process from KANA to KANJI compound-word. In their experiment, many pseudo compound words were produced by undergraduate students. To investigate an evaluation process for these pseudo compound words, compound-wordlikeness evaluation task for these pseudo compound words was conducted. Subjects' task was to judge whether a stimulus is legitimate compound word which appears in a dictionary. In a series of 4 experiments, subjects regarded some pseudo compounds as real existing compounds, and subjects' compound-wordlikeness judgement was affected by their knowledge on compound words. The results suggested that we acquire common meta knowledge for compound-acceptability (whether real or pseudo) through individual learning of single Kanji characters and real compounds, and through this meta knowledge, individual knowledge on real compound words affect the judgement of compound-wordlikeness of pseudo compound words.

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This study is to (1) investigate the effects (if any) of L2 acquisition age, the length of exposure to L2, and gender on the bilingual dual coding hypothesis proposed by Paivio and Desrochers (1980) and (2) verify whether the bilingual dual coding effect in incidental recalls would be the same in Japanese-English as in Indo-European languages.
Balanced Japanese-English bilingual subjects are presented with (1) pictures to be labelled in English, (2) Japanese words to be translated into English, and (3) English words to be copied as they are. Later without warning they are tested to recall the generated English words.
The results showed a 3.7 : 3.2 : 1.0 ratio for pictorial : translation : copy encoding conditions, which is supportive of the bilingual dual coding hypothesis. Both small pictorial-translation difference and the high ratio for translation were interpreted as caused by the Japanese language specific effects-logographic features. No length of residence (LOR) or gender effects were observed. The onset age of L2 acquisition proved to be a significant factor, which added an extension to Arnedt and Gentile's (1986) ‘manner’-proficiencies of L1 and L2 prior to formal schooling as well as the language sequence in schooling (L1 to L2 or L2 to L1) should be considered in the bilingual dual coding framework. Thus, this experiment seems to reveal that the bilingual dual coding hypothesis is generalizable across (1) bilinguals not only in Indo-European alphabetic languages, but also in alphabetic/non-alphabetic languages, and (2) bilinguals in their childhood as well as adulthood.

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Paintings convey static information in two-dimensional form. Human beings have tried to express three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane using techniques such as perspective. Attempts have also been made to express changes over time in humans and nature on a static plane. This procedure also requires some techniques for embodiment of the movements in a static canvas.
In this study, we examined the embodied movement in the famous painting “The Milkmaid” by Vermeer. The painting was reconstructed in the three-dimensional space, and the movement embodied in the painting (i.e., the milk flowing from the jug) was analyzed.
The results of analysis showed that the jug held by the maid must be moving slightly for the milk be to flowing from the jug. This implies that a slight arm movement was embodied by Vermeer in the maid's gesture in the painting, which is contrary to past interpretation of the painting.

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Darwinian natural selection theory has large importance in biology. It has been producing many sub-theories on evolution of animal behavior. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology that employs the evolutionary sub-theories to construct hypotheses on the design of human mind; one of the most interesting biological phenomena. Following an introduction of the natural selection theory, this paper describes some empirical studies on cognitive psychology that have been undertaken with the evolutionary psychological approach. Specifically we will observe the application of a) a theory of social behavior to the study of reasoning, b) a theory of foraging behavior to the study of decision making, and c) sexual selection theory to the study of cognitive sex differences. This paper also presents arguments on domain specificity and innateness of human mind; an important topic that often follows evolutionary psychology. Criticisms on evolutionary psychology will be discussed as well.

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