Though there have been significant number of interesting studies on graduate students' research environment, they still lack long-term view of their research activities. The purpose of this study is to clarify graduate students' long-term use of their research environment. We focused on "Research Settings" such as formal research meetings and informal conversation within students' rooms, where most of the master course students took part in to acquire indispensable research information for their theses, and conducted investigations (interview + questionnaire) on 22 masters of a department of interdisciplinary studies, of their evaluation of usefulness of these research settings at each stage of their research activity. Consequently, their styles of the use of research settings in long-term were categorized into 3 types: "Moderate Use", "Purposeful Use" both of multiple settings, and "Exclusive Use of Students' Room". The students of former 2 types tended to evaluate formal laboratory meetings as more informative than informal conversation in students' room at the initial stage of their research, i.e. the exploratory stage, but, on the other hand, the other way round at the following practicing stage. The results suggest that the research environment should be examined in long-term view according to at least 2 stages.

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An experiment was conducted to investigate the process of reasoning about directions in an egocentric space. Each participant walked through a corridor containing an angular turn ranging in size from 0° to 90°, in 15° increments. A direction was given to participants at the entrance of the corridor and they were asked to answer this direction at the end of this corridor. Considering the fact that participants had to reason the direction in the featureless corridor, two hypotheses were proposed: (i) reasoning about directions falls into qualitative reasoning by using a small number of coarse angular categories (four 90° categories or eight 45° categories: 90° categories consist of front, back, left, right; 45° categories consist of 90° categories and the four intermediates) that reference axes generate; (ii) reasoning about directions would be done by recalling the rotation angle from the traveling direction to the direction that participants tried to answer. In addition, the configuration of reference axes that participants employed was examined. Both hypotheses were supported, and the data designated that reference axes consisted of eight directions: a pair of orthogonal axes and diagonals.

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In this paper, the impact of the housing environment on the quality of mothers' parenting through its effect on the mothers' health condition was examined. 653 mothers living in the Tokyo metropolitan area and a city in Saitama prefecture completed questionnaires regarding their housing environment, health condition, and quality of parenting. The correlation analysis showed significant relationships among the environmental (housing) condition, health, and quality of parenting. To clarify the hypothesized interactions among these variables, a SEM path model was established. The results of the analysis showed that the model that assumes mothers' health condition as the mediator of housing environment's effect on parenting quality showed the best fitness. This finding suggested the possibility of arguing the presence of an effect of the housing environment on quality of mothers' parenting, due to mothers' health condition.

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Concerning complex and collected scenes such as the scenes of architecture, there aren't enough experimental verification for the mechanical "rationality" of morphological cognition of persons. The author projects slides of scenes of architecture which are well known by the subjects on the screen, timingwise accumulatively under the condition of high speed saccades of persons, and after each intervals of projection, the subjects make sketches under the condition of the study by the maintenance rehearsals of short term memories. Then the analyses of mechanical rationality of the morphological cognition of the images are executed. For the analyses, computer image processing on the shown images of the scenes of architecture was executed, through the process of edge detection, distribution by the brightness, and, tracing on the edges to get primal sketches for each brightness, and to get the phased images correspondent to the depths of shadows and shadings of the mass of the scenes of architecture, which correspondent to the saccades of persons. The result indicates that there are two types of parts on the studies of the sketches of the subjects. The first parts can be rationally explained by morphological characteristics, the second parts request analyses of the perceptual circulation with the factors such as meaning, value, schema, and the last ones should be the next theme to be studied.

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