Lexical alignment in conversation involves higher-order cognitive activities like perspective taking. Past studies have shown that a prior knowledge schema influences the occurrence of rapid lexical alignment. However, lexical alignment studies using Japanese words have not been fully investigated; therefore, one of the challenges is to investigate the occurrence of lexical alignment at the word level in Japanese. Considering this, this study developed a Japanese version of the lexical alignment task implemented online and examined the occurrence of alignment. We also investigated the factor of mere belief about the participants’ partners, which was investigated in past studies by having participants interact with either a human agent or a computer (as a partner). This study conducted an online experiment with 54 participants. The results show that two types of alignment behavior emerged during the task. The influence of belief was only detected on the participants’ impressions towards their partner; however, it did not appear in a lexical alignment. We discussed whether the participants updated their schema during their task, and if so, considered its influence on the alignment behavior. Further online experiments focusing on the types of schemas are discussed for future studies.

Although recent advances in the tools and platforms used for remote psychological experiments have allowed experimental psychologists to safely continue their research during the COVID-19 pandemic, procedures for remote studies of infant vision are not established. Here, we report a newly developed procedure for on-demand remote experiments on infant vision. We provided participants (parents of infants) with a portable apparatus (a computer tablet) and instructions for conducting the experiments in their homes. A custom application controlled the stimulus presentation and video recording of infant behavior via the tablet’s front-facing camera. Videos of the infants’ looking behaviors saved on the tablet were analyzed off-line by the experimenters. Using this method, we tested 24 infants aged 6–12 months and successfully replicated the findings of previous lab-based studies on optic flow perception in infancy. The newly developed method holds promise for use in remote studies of infant vision.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed significant restrictions on experiments such as those using motion capture suits in the laboratory. On the other hand, the number of users of virtual reality (VR) social network services has been increasing due to the pandemic. Thus, we constructed a laboratory in VRChat, one of the VR social network services, where full-body ownership experiments can be conducted, and validated it. The subjects entered the experimental world in VRChat, changed into the experimental avatar, and participated in the experiment. The subject’s movements and the avatar were synchronized or asynchronized with 1-s delay. After 5-min ball reaching using the avatar, subjective evaluations were made regarding senses of body ownership, agency, and pseudo-haptics. In the synchronous condition, we obtained a stronger sense of body ownership, agency, and pseudo-haptic sensation than in the asynchronous condition, reproducing the results of previous studies. These results suggest that the laboratory in the public VR social network enables us to manipulate experimental conditions, and perform experiments on full-body illusion.

Estimating and understanding the feelings of others (i.e., empathy) is essential in human society. Empathy with others in distress is called “sympathy,” in which we approach to the distressed others to console them, and/or help them. Preverbal infants show similar approaching behavior to a victim in aggressive social interaction of geometrical objects. It is called rudimentary sympathy, and it is also observed in adults. However, it is not clear whether rudimentary empathy is affected by other factors such as people’s mood. In the present study, we conducted an experiment to clarify the effects of emotional valence (positive and negative) on rudimentary sympathy in adults using a remote and online experiment. Positive and negative emotions were generated using audio stimuli. After participants listened to the stimuli, they observed an animation consisting of aggressor and victim objects, and responded to which they preferred more. We found that participants preferred the victim object to the aggressor object in both positive and negative emotions. These results suggest that rudimentary sympathy arises in adults regardless of their emotional valence.

With the expansion of psychological studies conducted online, researchers show greater interest in the quality of the data collected from online studies. Factors that may compromise the data quality include lack of control of environmental variables, nonnaïveté due to repeated participation, and reduced attention to the study materials. In this study, we examined the possibility that type of device and the presentation format of study materials may compromise the quality of responses. An online study with a total of 1,005 crowd-workers (PC=485, mobile=520) revealed that mobile devices were associated with less attentive responses. Results also showed that mobile devices tended to elicit relatively inconsistent responses to psychological scales, specifically when combined with the multiple presentation formats, in which all items of the scale were presented at once. The results suggest that the importance of considering the type of device and the format of information presentation in the future studies conducted online. Future research in this domain should further address factors that may lower the quality of data, such as demographics.

Among the models of the metacomprehension judgment process, the anchoring and adjustment model by Zhao and Linderholm (2008) is superior considering its generality and explanatory capacity. However, this model is theoretical rather than empirical. Therefore, the following two major problems need to be solved: (1) quantifying the anchoring and adjustment effect and (2) quantifying the influence of the factors that affect the adjustment process. To tackle these problems, we proposed a novel mathematical formulation of the anchoring and adjustment model by considering metacomprehension as a probabilistic distribution. Moreover, using data collected from an online experiment, we estimated the parameters of the proposed model. As a result, it is indicated that (a) the effect of anchoring by self-perception of ability is larger than that of adjustment by experience in reading metacomprehension, and (b) five factors such as familiarity of the contents can explain the adjustment process. Finally, based on the results, we discussed the explanatory capacity of the model, as well as the quantitative effect and influence of the above two points.

Although online research has shown promise as an alternative to laboratory research, it is unsuitable for the mere exposure effect because it is unknown whether participants sufficiently pay attention to repeated stimuli. To overcome this problem, we developed an online research method using exposure frequency in everyday life, which was combined with a cross-cultural comparison to consider the effect of confounding factors. Participants familiar and unfamiliar (Japanese and English speakers) with kana characters evaluated their attractiveness. After standardizing the attractiveness for each participant, we calculated the mean of each character’s view for each type of speaker to calculate a character-based correlation. The result of the Japanese speakers showed a moderate positive correlation between attractiveness and log-transformed exposure frequency to the characters counted by a Japanese corpus, indicating an occurrence of the mere exposure effect. This result cannot be explained by such confounding factors as the visual aspects of the characters due to a non-significant correlation in the English speakers. This study provided a more appropriate way to study the mere exposure effect in online environments.

To explore the possibility of conducting online experiments on audiovisual crossmodal interaction, we investigated the temporal accuracy and precision of stimulus presentation in Lab.js. We measured the presentation time as well as the onset and offset timings of audiovisual stimuli in two experiments; we used three operating systems (Windows10, macOS, and iOS), three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and OS native), and three network environments (external network, internal network, and local host). Results showed that most software environments—with the exception of iOS—provide reasonable precision, irrespective of the network environment. In contrast, the accuracy almost systematically varied depending on the combination of the operating system and the browser. These results suggest that Lab.js is suitable for audiovisual experiments to some extent if audiovisual synchronization lag is corrected based on the information provided by the Lab.js default plug-in, which can detect the user’s OS and browser. However, considering that typical user hardware/software environments are far more complex and diverse than that of this study, effective ways to control users’ experimental environments should be investigated in future studies to obtain reliable data in online experiments.

The explicit sense of agency (SoA) is usually assessed using rating tasks. However, it is challenging to minimize non-serious participants. To address this, we investigated whether including catch trials could itself influence the effect of action–outcome delays on explicit SoA in an online experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to no-catch, catch with alert, or catch without alert groups. They rated SoA by a circle appearing after the fixation disappeared following a 200–1,000 ms delay following a keypress. Without the fixation (i.e., the catch trials), the circle suddenly appeared without a keypress in the catch with alert and catch without alert groups. The participants were either informed in advance or not about the catch trials. A reliable action–outcome delay effect was observed in all groups, and found to be the least in the catch without alert group. These results suggest explicit SoA could be measured accurately in online experiments without catch trials, whose inclusion did not improve SoA measurement. We concluded that catch trials in online experiments should be combined with information.

Perceptual contrast has been regarded as the fixed relation between stimulus and reaction including time error. Adaptation-Level Theory aims at a comprehensive understanding of perception and judgment in terms of the reciprocity between the state of organism and environment. The purpose of this study was to examine how perceptual contrast of tonal length would appear in three-tone sequences within the framework of Adaptation-Level Theory. Three experiments were conducted to obtain the PSE of the duration of the second tone (standard tone) as the physical duration of the third tone (comparison tone). The durational relationship between the three successive tones and that between the first tone (leading tone) and the ISI were varied systematically. As a result, perceptual contrast of tonal lengths was observed in all experiments, and this result can be described in the context of Adaptation-Level Theory as a shift of adaptation level due to the presentation of the first tone (leading tone). That is, the perceptual contrast of tonal length is defined not only by one parameter of tone sequence but by the entire tone sequence.

The temporal integration of sequential perceptual information has been examined in previous studies using the concept of visual persistence. For example, Di Lollo (1977) clarified the temporal characteristics of the integration of two different images using the missing dot task paradigm. While the characteristics of visual persistence have been thought to be constant for any figure, some previous studies have reported differences depending on the orientation of the line (Bowling & Lovegrove, 1981). In this study, we investigated whether the visual persistence process is different in the case of vertical and horizontal lines. In the experiment, we used an integration task, in which the absence of a figure is perceived only when two consecutively presented images are integrated, and a separation task, in which the features of a figure are perceived when two consecutively presented images are separated (Wutz, Muschter, van Koningsbruggen, Weisz, & Melcher, 2016). The results showed that the performance of the subjects in the case of vertical lines was significantly lower in the integration task, but significantly higher in the segregation task. These results suggest that the visual persistence of the vertical line is shorter than that of the horizontal line.

In interactive sports, the key to success is often the ability to make appropriate decisions and actions intuitively in split seconds. The NTT Sports Brain Science project (SBP) is researching brain functions that are exhibited by athletes under such conditions, and applying the findings to improving the performance of athletes. A successful example is the collaboration with the Japan women’s national softball team, which won the gold medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

I will discuss structural brain imaging analysis of athletes. First, I will introduce a study that examined the characteristics of brain structure in different athletic events. Next, I will show the results of structural brain imaging studies on individual athletes as examples to demonstrate the potential of structural brain imaging studies on individuals. Finally, I will discuss the current problems and prospects of structural brain imaging studies on athletes.

Use-dependent and impairment-specific brain plasticity is hypothesized to interact and enhance neural reorganization in the central nervous system (CNS) of athletes with physical impairments. Studies on Paralympians’ brains are helpful in achieving a fundamental understanding of the underlying neural mechanism related to CNS reorganization after physical therapy or athletic training. Information learned from these individuals also provides new insights into sports- and rehabilitation-related neuroscience.

This article describes the basic principles and provides useful tips for recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in psychology experiments. The topics include: selection of electroencephalogram (EEG) amplifiers and choice of recording parameters, types and choice of electrodes, explanation of balanced non-cephalic electrode reference, a step-by-step procedure to determine electrode positions according to the International 10–20 system, techniques for secure placement of dish electrodes onto the scalp, explanation of what to observe in the EEG to monitor subject conditions during experiments, and many practical tips for reducing noise and artifacts in EEG data. The article is intended to be a desk-side guide for beginners and for those confronting difficulties in obtaining high-quality, artifact-free data in ERP experiments.