When two targets are presented in a rapid stream of distractors, the accuracy of identifying the second target is impaired when the temporal lag between the targets is brief (attentional blink; AB). When the second target is presented immediately after the first target, the AB deficit is considerably reduced, a phenomenon called Lag-1 sparing. A recent study (Kristjansson & Nakayama, 2002) however, reported that Lag-1 sparing did not occur when multiple distractor streams were presented, although it had occurred in other studies (e.g., Peterson & Juola, 2000). The present study found that specific target attributes were the key for this inconsistency. When two targets in the same stream appear to be similar and are distinctive from the distractors, the first target is masked by the second. This masking of the first target increases the AB deficit, and Lag-1 sparing does not occur.

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Studying a list of words that are semantically related to an unseen word creates a false recognition. In the visual domain, research shows that false recognition increases when the length of the study phase is extended. This study examined whether the increase in false recognition is specific to the visual domain, or if it is common to another modality, such as the auditory domain. The results demonstrate that auditory false recognition increases when the insertion of an extra blank interval between words or between lists lengthens the study phase. Therefore, these findings suggest that processes not specific to visual modality mediate the effect of study phase length on false recognition.

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The so-called panoramic photograph familiar to amateurs is a pseudo-panoramic picture because it is only more elongated than a normal-shaped photograph. Nevertheless, the photograph gives the impression of a wide view of the scene. If then, the panoramic impression increases with an increment in the horizontal to vertical aspect ratio and the size of the photograph, does the perceived lateral distance also increase in a similar manner? The present study examined the relationship between the panoramic impression and the perception of lateral expansion in photographs. In the experiment, 18 students evaluated the impression of a panoramic view in 45 photographs which varied in both aspect ratio and size. Another 14 students were asked to estimate the apparent lateral distance between two corn-shaped objects in each of the same photographs. The results showed that the panoramic impression increased significantly as either the aspect ratio or size increased. But the perceived distances were not influenced by the aspect ratio, and the apparent lateral distance decreased as the size of the photograph increased. These findings suggest that the perception of lateral expansion and the related panoramic impression might differ in their qualities.

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The present lecture article aims to clarify both historically and theoretically important significance of Kuroda's pioneering work. In 1930, he published an article concerning the post-operative vision in a case of the congenitally blind. The case of YT was a lady who had been blind due to congenital cataract of both eyes and received the operation (extraction of cataract) at the age of 42. According to her own verbal reports and the ophthalmic surgeon's reports, YT seemed to have an ability to see brightness and colors prior to the operation. Kuroda had an opportunity to see her three times (1st: 40 days; 2nd 45 days; and 3rd: almost three and a half months after the operation, respectively). Among others the following results obtained through some experiments as to YT's post-operative ability to perceive visual stimuli of various kinds are entered into details: (a) the extent of Muller-Lyer's illusion as measured for her was similar to that of the normally sighted children (aged 7-12 years); (b) to see in depth the perspective geometrical figures such as the Necker cube was extremely difficult; and (c) when presented with stimuli such as pictures of familiar movie actresses of those days, it was mostly difficult for her to interpret each facial expression. These results are discussed here by comparison with those of the previous as well as more recent studies. Furthermore, Kuroda published two books full of suggestions in 1933 and 1938, respectively. In the latter he expressed a new and original idea concerning the even now unresolved issue of visual identification of objects. Its applicability to give an explanation for some findings on the post-operative progress in identifying objects (cf. Torii & Mochizuki, 2000) is briefly discussed.

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Clinical neuropsychology is an applied science concerned with brain-behavior relationship. It has regarded individual approach as well as scientific approach as important since the object is in the filed of clinical medicine. Therefore, it can be said the liaison area of not only basic psychology and clinical psychology but also medicine and psychology. It can be said one area where the base ties to clinical, and is hoped for the development in psychology of Japan. The following are at least important for psychologists to be engaged in research or clinical work. Knowledge of basic psychology, acquisition of basic methodology like the experiment, knowledge of clinical psychology and skill of interview, knowledge and technique of neuroscience, basic medical knowledge, and communications skills are required as a specialist. Establishment of educational system for this is one of the important matters. The role at the university in the future will be to bring upon the expert of psychology who can discuss with the specialists in other fields, and to keep practice of research and clinical work.

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The conflict has pointed out between clinical psychology and academic psychology in Japan. A possible solution to the conflict will emerge on the model of British Psychological Association. The clinical psychology, the psychotherapy and the counselling are different professions in Britain, since the type of work and the training system of each healthcare professionals is highly specialized in Britain. The practice of clinical psychologist is based on the policy of the scientist-practitioner model and the principle of the evidence-based practice. The area of abnormal psychology in British psychology has functioned as a mediator between clinical psychology and academic psychology in Britain. In contrast, the science-based clinical psychologist is a minority group in Japanese psychologists, although psychotherapy and counselling are prosperous in Japan. Abnormal psychology is premature in Japan, so a conflict emerge between clinical and academic psychology. It was proposed to establish science-based clinical psychology and abnormal psychology in Japan in order to resolve the conflict.

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Visual psychophysics is a research strategy that analyzes the visual system from behavioral responses to visual stimuli. Although it may look outdated in comparison with the other advanced neuroscience methodologies, psychophysics can make important contributions to current visual neuroscience in many ways. First, in other neuroscience studies including brain imaging, one can use various techniques developed in psychophysics. Second, psychophysical responses can be used as target measures that should be predicted in terms of neural activities. Third, psychophysics can estimate certain aspects of anatomical structures of visual processing. Fourth, psychophysics is a powerful technique to estimate functional structures of visual processing independently of other neuroscience studies. Fifth, psychophysics is the only scientific method to analyze subjective visual world, the way of which is represented in neural mechanism still remains a mystery. Finally, psychophysics can lead visual science by initiating studies on new visual functions.

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Despite the importance of auditory perception in our everyday life and in the history of experimental psychology, systematic investigations of auditory organization began just recently. Auditory events and auditory streams seem to play vital roles in the very early stages of auditory organization just like figures and grounds do in visual organization. One of the new auditory illusions, the gap transfer illusion, is described in order to show the high potential of this new research field.

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Roles of experiments in modern psychology were discussed from five points of view. 1) Sophistication of common knowledge. 2) Test of working hypothesis. 3) Finding of new evidence. 4) Demonstration of a theory. 5) Educational tools. Finally, the author focused on role of animal experiment. To understand evolution of human mind, we have to compare our mind with that of other animals. To understand mind as function of the nervous system, we need a lot of knowledge obtained from animal experiment. Training of animal experiment is also good educational tool for psychology course.

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Visual perception is the culmination of neural events transpiring within a distributed network within the brain. The network, while clearly not serial in nature, has a hierarchical structure implying the analysis of different aspects of the visual scene at different stages of processing. In recent years brain imaging techniques have become very popular as a means for identifying functional stages of processing within this hierarchy. We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that psychophysical techniques are also available for identifying sequences of processing-applied in this fashion, these techniques embody what is termed psychoanatomy. In this talk, I will summarize a couple of these techniques, along with some results from their application. I hope to show that these psychoanatomical techniques, in concert with brain imaging, offer the best hope of unraveling the complexities of the neural architecture supporting visual perception.

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Many psychological studies in healthy and neurological disordered participants indicate the involvement of proprioceptive information in various aspects of perception and action. Vision is one of the most important organs which provide such proprioceptive information to nervous system (Visual proprioception', Gibson, 1979). In fact, a large field visual motion compels observers to perceive self-motion. We investigated the effect of the visual proprioceptive information on spatial and temporal sensory processing, using an immersive virtual reality system (CAVE) which can properly create large field three-dimensional visual stimuli essential for visual proprioception. Our experiments in the spatial domain have shown that the perceived depth order of two visual dots with horizontal disparities systematically varies depending on the direction of the visual motion. Those in the temporal domain have also shown that the long-lasting exposure of the visual motion modulates the perceived order of auditory as well as visual events-an event in the incoming field of the visual motion is perceived prior to that in the outgoing field. We discuss the implications of the results for the role of the visual proprioceptive information in maintaining perceptual constancy of the world and behaving in an adaptive manner during self-motion.

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Spatial recognition of near space is closely related to the recognition of the somesthetic sense. Our brain has to integrate spatial information from various modalities to recognize space. In this study, we conducted an fMRI experiment investigating the interaction of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information in our brain to recognize the position of stimuli. The participants' task was to assess whether visual and tactile stimuli, presented to the right or left were on the same or different sides when subjects crossed or uncrossed their hands. The effect of changing posture was seen in the medial posterior parietal and in the dorsal visual areas. The visual area's activation elicited by posture change suggests a reciprocal process between association cortex and visual cortices in spatial cognition. In addition, the right inferior frontal area was activated by the contextually defined right stimuli. This suggests a higher-level spatial representation and anisotropy of our spatial recognition.

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Previous studies have used a sequence choice procedure to explore the cognitive representations and motor programming of forthcoming response sequences. The choice reaction times are applied to model the structures and processes underlying the choice. Although the Hierarchical Editor (HED) model by Rosenbaum et al. (1984) was fairly robust in previous experiments, a counterexample of the model was found. For this counterexample, he suggested a cancellation method with omit decoding of rejected subsequences. However, it is unclear that HED with cancellation was applied in what type of sequences. The author proposed a remaining processing resources model. This model can account successfully for the data. Also, the differences in depth perception between actual and virtual environments were discussed in the later part of this paper.

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The Parasitic Humanoid (PH) is a wearable robot for modeling of nonverbal human behavior. The PH can be also one of the best media as behavioral interface because the PH has the advantage of embodiment and adaptation. In this report, we refer to the usage of wearable robotics as behavioral interface. The PH assists the wearer with not power but behavioral induction. The behavioral induction is driven by sensory stimulus synchronous to the behavior. The stimuli are designed to induce entailment cyclic motions unconsciously and to correct one-shot motions consciously. The concept of PH is very effective as the design philosophy in the interface that uses the human body resources.

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In the retinas of frogs synchronized discharges accompanied by γ-range oscillations (the oscillatory synchronization, OS) are generated among OFF-sustained ganglion cells (dimming detectors) in response to a dimming stimulus. We have already shown that an expanding dark spot generates the retinal OS and elicits escape behavior, which is abolished when the OS is suppressed by a GABA_A receptor antagonist. Recently we observed that a GABA_C receptor antagonist, (1,2,5,6-tetrahydropyridine-4-yl) methylphosphinic acid (TPMPA), enhanced the oscillatory activity of dimming detectors. In the present study, we investigated how OS and escape behavior were modulated when TPMPA was applied to the retina. An intraocular injection of TPMPA potentiated escape behavior. Moreover, multi-electrode recordings from isolated retinas revealed that the OS was significantly enhanced by TPMPA. On the other hand, TPMPA did not affect the response properties of other ganglion cells which were not dimming detectors. Furthermore, modulation of the retinal OS by the GABA receptor antagonists was closely related to the changes in escape behavior. Consequently, we conclude that the OS may encode escape-related information.

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In a previous study we have shown, by using functional MRI during a multiple object permanence tracking (MOPT) task, that the representation of dynamic objects needs the cooperation of widespread neural systems (Imaruoka, Saiki, Miyauchi; 2005). In the present study we modified the MOPT task, and measured the brain activity during the task with fMRI, so that we could explore the precise correspondence of a number of cognitive processes and neural systems related to the representation of dynamic objects. The cognitive processes included object tracking, the maintenance of visual information, the integration of visual spatial information, and other information about an object. The neural systems included the anterior, superior, and inferior frontal areas, and the parietal area. The results suggested a close relationship between: (a) the right superior frontal gyrus and the maintenance of a coherency of the dynamic objects; and (b) the parietal regions and the tracking of the visual objects.

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We investigated the impression of an overall lightness of a space surrounded by wallpaper where the total area of the figure and ground were equal. In Experiment 1 and 2 the 10 participants compared the overall perceptual lightness between two rooms. In Experiment 3 the participants compared the perceptual expanse of the figure and ground in each room. The results revealed the following: (1) The influence of the ground on perceptual lightness was stronger than that of the figure. (2) The expanse of the total area of the ground was perceived to be larger than that of the figure in pattern A. It was consistent with the known phenomenon that the ground spreads behind the figure. While the figure was perceived to be larger in pattern B and the ground had less dominance in the appearance of the overall pattern lightness.

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We investigated the temporal-characteristics of depth perception from motion parallax by presenting stimuli with an abrupt change in motion parallax. In the first experiment the participants compared the depth perceived from two stimuli, one of which changed its motion parallax abruptly. The results indicated that the same depth was perceived when the averaged parallax was the same. In the second experiment, the participants reported the change in depth perceived from a stimulus with a variety of motion parallax changes. The reaction time of the subjects was reversely proportional to the amount of parallax change. These results imply that the depth perception evoked by motion parallax is averaged in a period of time more than one second.

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"Geons" (Biederman, 1987) with different rotation angles were sequentially presented through a haploscope and the participants performed a sequential matching task. The RT increased as the rotation angle increased. The 3D condition, in which the stimulus was stereoscopically presented, was performed faster than the 2D condition. The effect of the rotation angle was equivalent for the 2D and 3D conditions. Furthermore, there was a possibility that depth information is helpful in extracting the qualitative information of an object. These results suggested that the qualitative information extracted from view-dependent 2D representation plays a crucial role in constructing the representation of objects.

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For prolonged cognitive tasks the efficiency of an observer, as a function of test period, is often illustrated as a downward-sloping curve. This deterioration is called the vigilance decrement and is due to a shift in attention during a task. We have investigated the temporal features of attention by using an RSVP task. We focused on transient performance in a trial, in addition to prolonged performance throughout the experiment. Throughout the experiment a vigilance decrement occurred. During a trial however, the detection of a target at the beginning of a sequence was dramatically low and recovered as it appeared later. This result has been shown neither in the vigilance studies, which predict high performance after the task onset, nor in the RSVP studies, which predict high and fair detection of only target in the sequence. This result would reflect a gradual modulation of temporal attention to a rapid sequence.

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Some studies have reported that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) increases its activation relative to the intensity of an olfactory stimulus. On the other hand, some studies have suggested that this phenomenon is not observed. The procedural difference of the 2 groups of investigations was the concurrent presentation, or not, of an additional cue. Our study focused on this difference and involved a neuro-imaging technique to investigate the effects, on 6 participants, of a verbal cue and changes of olfactory stimulus intensity. We observed that when the verbal cue was absent, activation of the OFC was related to the stimulus intensity. This result was in agreement with the observations of previous studies. However, although activation of the OFC is linearly related to the intensity of the olfactory stimulus when other cues are present this linear relationship may become unclear.

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In the present study we report an illusion in which sound presented near to the head induces a tactile experience. We stroked the left ear of a dummy head with a paintbrush and recorded the sound and the scene. We then presented the sound, the images, or the both to participants. The participants rated their subjective tactile experience by answering a questionnaire. The results revealed that the participants felt a tickling sensation when the sound was presented near to the head, but not when it was presented distant from the head. Viewing the scene had little or no effect on the tactile impression. The results suggest that audiotactile interactions occur predominantly in a region immediately surrounding the head.

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This study investigated whether infants and young children are able to perform crossmodal matching of small numerosities, i.e., the recognition of numerical equivalence between sets presented with different sensory modalities. In an infant experiment that used a violation-of-expectation paradigm, 6-month-old infants looked significantly longer at the numerically non-equivalent events (e.g., 2-tone/3-object events) than at the numerically equivalent events (e.g., 3-tone/3-object events). In a child experiment that used a matching-to-sample task, 3- to 4-year-old children were able to select correctly the stimulus card that matched the number of tones they heard (0-4 tones). These findings suggest that infants and children are capable of relating small numerosities of sets presented with different sensory modalities.

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We examined the role of motion information on infants' recognition of unfamiliar faces. Previous studies suggested that motion information promotes infants' perception (Kellman & Spelke, 1983; Otsuka & Yamaguchi, 2003), and therefore we theorized that motion information should facilitate infants' face recognition. In the present study, we compared infants' recognition memory for unfamiliar faces learned in a moving or a static condition. Infants aged 3- to 5-months (N=24) were familiarized with a smiling female face either in the moving or static condition. After familiarization, infants were tested using a pair of novel and familiar female faces. We found that the infants showed a significant preference for novel faces only in the moving condition. The present results suggest that learning from the moving condition promotes infants' recognition of unfamiliar faces.

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The maximum number of streams that could be heard from a mixed sound was measured. In each trial a mixed voice and a single voice (probe) were successively presented. The 7 adult subjects were required to judge whether, or not, the probe was present in the multiple voices. The perceptual limit (the maximum number of streams) was calculated by multiplying the true hit ratio with the number of speakers. The estimated perceptual limit was approximately 3 when more than 4 speakers were presented. The results indicate that auditory processing is more effective than previously believed (cf. Kashino & Hirahara, 1996). The data indicated that the probe could be detected more easily when it was presented before the mixed voices rather than after the mixed voices. This may indicate that the perceptual limit results from a limited attention capacity.

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We used a framed solid figure in our experiment. Most of the participants who observed it perceived differences in brightness on its three planes. We moved the figure in two ways, back and forth, under the same lighting conditions. The perception of the differences in brightness was changed, depending on the figure location. These perceptions of a framed figure without physically defined surfaces show the same relationships as the perceptions of a fanfold paper with surfaces. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that a perceptive scheme of a fanfold paper (schematic mediating variables) gives a model to assimilate a framed figure (perceptual local variables). It can then be stated that the perception of differences in brightness is possibly actualized when perceptual local variables are subsumed into schematic mediating variables.

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In Experiment 1 the observers searched for a bright, static square among three dark squares. The search display consisted of ten frames and was covered with dynamic grayscale noise which had a random or unidirectional motion. The aperture was present during different percentages of noises. By measuring d', it was revealed that detection was more sensitive in unidirectional, rather than random, noise. This result suggested that temporal luminance summation played a minor role in detection. In Experiment 2 the observers searched for a bright, vertical bar among three dark vertical bars in the presence of dynamic noise which was perpendicular, parallel, or random, to the bar orientation. Detection was most sensitive when the movement of the noise was perpendicular. The result suggested that successive visual transients which were visible through the apertures, and which were unrelated to movement of the noise, were critical for target detection.

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The aim of the present study was to clarify whether the pendulum motion of a Point-Light Walker (PLW) created a perception of it's "human likeness". To quantify the amount of spatiotemporal information required to create an impression of "human likeness", the PLW was passed behind a slit which varied in width and the exposure time was also varied. Observers assessed the "human likeness" of each PLW display. The experimental results revealed that a distinct impression of "human likeness" is created when observers see more than a half cycle of the pendulum motion from the PLW for more than 410ms. These findings suggest that the pendulum motion of a PLW conveys information which is relevant to the perception of "human likeness" under certain spatial and temporal conditions.

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In this study we compared the performance of detecting biological motion in the foveal and peripheral visual fields. Correct and scrambled biological motion were successively presented and the subjects indicated which of the two intervals contained the biological motion. Detection performance (defined as resistance against noise) was determined by using a staircase method. In the foveal and peripheral visual fields detection performance was saturated as the stimulus size was increased. However the performance of detecting motion in the peripheral fields was not compensated by spatial magnification. These results suggest that the resource, or mechanism, for biological motion perception is confined to the central region of the visual field.

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