The present study investigated the effects of perceived depth of a fixation stimulus on peripheral depth perception while convergence and accommodation produced inconsistent depth cues. We presented a standard stimulus at the central visual field and a comparison stimulus at the peripheral visual field. Observers judged whether perceived depth of a comparison stimulus is located or not on the fronto-parallel plane at a standard stimulus while fixating it. The convergence of a standard stimulus was varied as an independent variable. We measured points of subjective equality of perceived depth between the standard and comparison stimuli. Perceived depth of a comparison stimulus was located closer as the eccentricity increased. This shift of perceived depth was smaller when the convergence angle was large. This result suggests that the effects of accommodation on depth perception are comparatively larger in peripheral visual field while convergence is the main depth cue in the central visual field.

Simple geometric shapes modulate performance in visual detection tasks. This phenomenon may be attributable to the emotional information conveyed by simple geometric shapes. On the other hand, emotional information affects visual short-term memory performance. However, it is unclear whether simple geometric shapes can modulate the memory process. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of simple geometric shapes using a memory task designed to resolve some experimental problems. Experiment 1 compared the visual short-term memory capacity for a circle (rated positively), inverted triangle (rated negatively), and triangle (rated neutrally). Memory capacity for the circle was larger than for the inverted triangle. Experiments 2A and 2B did not indicate that the advantage in memory capacity associated with the circle was attributable to redundancy. Experiment 3 showed that the advantage associated with the circle was replicable in the single probe paradigm. These results indicated that emotional information conveyed by simple geometric shapes modulate visual short-term memory capacity. Future work should investigate the relationship between the advantage associated with the circle and other mental impressions during memory tasks and clarify the mechanisms underlying the effects of simple geometric shapes on cognition.

The McGurk effect occurs when inconsistencies between a person’s voice and facial movements cause misperceptions among listeners. In this study, we investigated whether these misperceptions are affected by the context in which the stimuli are experienced. We used sentences with a target word that was either a meaningful (word sentence) or meaningless (non-word sentence) three-syllable term. The speakers’ voices and facial movements during the second (target) syllable of the target word involved the sounds /ba/, /ga/, or /da/, which were combined independently. Participants reported what they heard during the combined voice-movement stimuli. Incongruity between target syllables in the word sentences and voices indicated a high error ratio with regard to the voices. In addition, congruency between target syllables in non-word sentences and voices also indicated a high error ratio for voices. When the sentences and facial movements were meaningful, many responses matched the facial movements shown, beyond the classic McGurk effect. Completing the Japanese sentences with misperceptions was caused by higher-level cognitive processing in order to understand the sentence.

In sports, a variety of brain functions hold the key to winning, such as grasping current conditions, strategizing against one’s opponent, and making instantaneous decisions under pressure. Most of these functions, however, are implicit brain functions that the athlete is not even aware of. The NTT Sports Brain Science project was established in January 2017 to conduct research with the aim of understanding superior implicit brain functions in top athletes, identifying the factors in winning, and improving the performance of athletes based on research findings. Two examples of findings, both on visuomotor strategies of elite baseball/softball batters, are introduced.

Vision Park, which is located in the entrance space of Hospital, is a comprehensive support area for the vision impaired. It is for people facing difficulty due to their low visual activity to regain the willingness to live. As a feature of the design, each area is divided by steps that can be learned for using a white cane and provided a spatial experience adapted to emotions within areas of different floor level. Each area has a lot of multiple information opportunities such as medical care, welfare, education, and hobbies. Not only benches that offer varied styles of stay, but also kitchen and the climbing wall, we offer the opportunity to regain lost daily life due to lack of visual activity and provide a space to create a self realization and awareness experience.

Variability in visual ability between individuals is increasing due to change in society such as the aging of the population. For this reason, it is becoming an important issue for individuals to understand their own visual abilities and divergence in perceptual research. In order to solve this problem, the visual ability test needs to be conducted outside the laboratory in a casual manner. A test that can be completed in a short period of time and can be enjoyed in any location is needed. Even if the test is casual, it must have a certain level of measurement accuracy. Tests with these conditions were verified by experiments in a laboratory and at a public event. Results from those experiments suggested that a certain level of measurement accuracy was maintained even when the test was less stressful for participants and became more enjoyable. Casual measurement of perception is also important for researches in perceptual diversity.

Having joined a panel discussion about visual disability and the psychonomic science, I considered how I could contribute from a standpoint that I myself am visually impaired. I have serious low vision. My vision is less than counting finger. My eyes are retinitis pigmentosa, which is a progressive disease. I’ve been losing my eyesight since primary school. In this article, I discuss how the psychonomic science research may relate to visual disability issues from my personal experience of progressive eye disease to the blind.

We examined the process of learning to see 2-dimensional forms, 3-dimensional solids and short distance in eight congenitally or early blind patients who acquired varying degree of sight after surgery. When we first asked them to recognize geometric solids such as cube, cylinder, cone and tetrahedron by using vison, it was found that this task was too difficult for them, even though they had the visual ability to identify 2-dimensional forms. The learning processes involved in attaining successful discrimination and identification are described here. The front distance of them became estimated mostly by the size of object at last. This study reveals the difficulty in transitioning from 2-dimensional discrimination to a 3-dismensional knowledge base.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that manipulates human senses to make a virtual space, object, or character feel as if it were real. Knowledge from psychology and cognitive science can be used to design more effective VR systems. On the other hand, various psychological experiments, which are difficult to carry out in the real environment, can be conducted by using VR technology. At the Cybernetics and Reality Engineering Laboratory at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST),we do various studies that manipulate the sense of reality for human welfare. In this article, several research projects in which the author was involved are introduced.

Falls are a significant concern for older adults because they can sometimes drive the development of dementia. With age, sensory noise increases at the input level, while the precision, frequency, and diversity of physical movements decrease at the output level. These changes could prevent the brain from appropriately reweighting several sensory signals for body perception and action and from recalibrating representations related to the body and body movements, resulting in increased risk of falling. In fact, our data demonstrate that the sense of body ownership of the foot (but not the hand), peripersonal space representations, and motor imagery of gait are differently established between older adults with a higher risk of falling and those with a lower risk. Physical exercise is not only useful for the prevention of muscle weakness, the enhancement of the cardiovascular systems, and an increase in brain blood flow, but also contributes to the statistical reduction of sensory noise because several sensory feedback signals are available, enabling appropriate recalibration. However, physical exercise is sometimes unsafe for older adults who already have physical weakness. Fall prevention programs implemented through a virtual reality system would provide them with another exercise tool to effectively stimulate the sensory-motor circuits in the brain and recalibrate their multisensory integration process and body-related representations in a safe, diversified, and individually tuned environment.

Emotional facial expressions are primary media for human emotional communication. Although functional neuroimaging studies have revealed brain activity associated with emotional expression processing, its temporal profile remains unclear. I review our two studies combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) in an effort to resolve this issue. In Study 1, MEG was recorded while participants observed dynamic facial expressions and source-reconstruction analyses utilizing previous fMRI data were conducted. In Study 2, fMRI and MEG data while participants viewed dynamic facial expressions were analyzed using dynamic causal modeling. The results revealed neural activity and connectivity in response to dynamic facial expressions at high spatial and temporal resolutions. These findings suggest the effectiveness of combination of neuroimaging and electrophysiological measures to identify the neural mechanisms underlying emotional expression processing.

Hyperscanning is a brand-new research method that aims to reveal the neural basis of communication by measuring the brain activity of two participants simultaneously during communication. The method is characterized by the calculation of correlation of brain activity between the two participants. This research method is occasionally met with the reaction that it is unscientific or not meaningful. In the present paper, we will explain the significance of the hyperscanning study and the mechanism behind the emergence of inter-brain neural correlation. We also introduce author's previous hyperscanning fMRI studies.

How should we define synesthesia? After more than a century of research, scientists have still not reached an agreement on what synesthesia is (and is not). The author’s opinion of this condition is that the disagreement on the definition of synesthesia is essentially a disagreement on determining what sensations are normal and what are unnormal. All different versions of the definition of synesthesia state, either explicitly or implicitly, that synesthesia is an extraordinary sensation, which is caused by the activation of a second sensory or cognitive pathway that is not normally activated by the inducing stimulus. In other words, the boundary between synesthesia and non-synesthesia depends on what sensations are considered normal, and this can only be judged subjectively. In so far as we consider synesthesia as an unnormal/extraordinary phenomenon, it is illogical to hope that there could be some objective criteria to distinguish synesthesia from non-synesthesia. The remedy is to assume continuity between synesthetic and non-synesthetic experiences.

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a condition in which a visual letter or character (grapheme) induces the experience of a specific color. Whereas synesthetic experiences have a percept-like nature in some respects, they are also strongly related to higher-order cognitive processing, such as that of language. Recent advances in synesthesia research have further revealed that grapheme-color synesthesia and grapheme learning are profoundly interconnected. This article introduces two recent studies in this area. One of the studies shows that acquiring new information on graphemes slightly but significantly affects the synesthetic colors of the graphemes, suggesting that synesthetic colors can be modulated to reflect the synesthete’s latest knowledge about graphemes. The other study, which examined the transfer of synesthetic colors associated with familiar graphemes to novel graphemes, suggests that synesthetic colors for graphemes may function as a grapheme acquisition aid. This article further discusses possible mechanisms underlying grapheme-color synesthesia.

Color appearance is a subjective experience. Recent studies have revealed that the color representation beyond cone-opponent system in the early stage of visual system may be the neural basis of color appearance. This manuscript will introduce the recent studies on the cortical color representations. Also, possible site of binding for different visual dimensions in the context of color-grapheme synesthesia will be discussed.

This article explains the basic features of survey, which is one of the major research methods in psychology, its pros and cons, and the points to be considered when conducting it. In particular, it focuses on Web surveys, which are becoming more common nowadays. It explains how the data obtained by Web surveys from broader generals are likely to be different from those obtained by conventional and convenient method, which inviting people close to the researcher, such as university students, to participate. The author hopes that this paper will provide the readers with a basic knowledge of web research and help them to select appropriate situations for survey data collection from among the various phases of psychological research.

In this article, I introduce the career path as a psychonomic scientists for Takuro Otsuka, a staff of psychological evidence section at the Forensic Science Laboratory, Hyogo Prefectural Police H.Q. I left the graduate school of Kwansei Gakuin University on the way and got a degree (psychology) after getting a job at my current workplace. I am in charge of polygraph examination, which is a kind of memory detection test in criminal investigations. At work, I use the knowledge and skills I learned in experimental psychology, which means the ability to make and verify hypothesis. I also have a fulfilling life as a basic psychological researcher.