In this tutorial article, I introduce the process of building a learning environment for designing psychological experiments for university students majoring in psychology. I think lab.js Builder is one of the best tools for beginners to learn programming of psychological experiments. Using a graphical user interface, this tool can easily help the student learn how to build up the basic components for a typical psychological experiment and how to translate each component to program code. I recommend using lab.js Builder in class for learning the programming of psychological experiments.

Online psychological experiments have become popular because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many tools to create online psychological experiments such as jsPsych, lab.js, and PsychoPy. Lab.js is known as a JavaScript library to create psychological experiments. Lab.js Builder can create psychological experiments through GUI. As lab.js Builder is a web application, we are able to use it in a variety of environments. In this paper, I introduce lab.js and explain how to create a simple word presentation task by lab.js Builder. Additionally, I also explain how to conduct this task offline and online. I hope that this paper help researcher planning online experiments.

A being with multiple arms has been a fascinating motif that stimulates people’s imagination and has been expressed in myths, fiction, and creations from all over the world for a long time. On the other hand, it has only been in the last decade that attempts to engineer multiple arms attaching to the human bodies have been made in earnest in academics. In this paper, three studies are introduced that we have conducted so far on human augmentation using robotic arms, aiming to freely control the third and fourth arms. Based on the findings obtained through each research, we discuss the possible approaches to increase the number of arms by engineering and the issues involved.

Since ancient times, humans have used technology to extend their abilities. The author has been conducting research to establish design guidelines of technology that allows users to feel it as an extension of their own abilities while appropriately extending their motor actions. In this paper, we present a prototype system developed focusing on three abilities: throwing, balancing and power.

In robotics, developments are in progress to enhance the physical and cognitive capabilities of humans by technologically extending the human body. The method of mapping the degrees of freedom of the operator’s arms and legs to the operating commands has been developed to control an extended body such as a wearable robot arm. On the other hand, the method has the limitation that the freedom of the operator’s limbs is constricted. Because the movements of the limbs are mapped to the actions of the wearable robot arm. In this article, a research project is introduced that uses virtual reality, wearable sensing technology, and machine learning to map human head movements and facial expressions to control an extended body that can be independent of the actions of human limbs.

Operant conditioning has not been well adapted to social behavior despite a growing interest among behavior analysts. This is due in part to technological limitations in measuring social behavior, especially in real time. This paper presents a summary of three of the present author’s attempts to adapt computer vision technologies to the study of social operant behavior of zebrafish (Danio rerio). Experiment 1 examined whether the location of a single zebrafish in a three-dimensional (3D) space could be tracked in real time. In Experiment 2, locations of two zebrafish were tracked simultaneously. A transparent partition was placed between the two fish to aid in their identification. A food reinforcer was delivered when the two fish approached one another across the partition. Experiment 3 examined whether it is possible to track multiple fish without such a partition. Results of these three experiments were promising, suggesting that computer vision can be useful in the study of social operant behavior.

Streams of operant behaviors emit not in a temporally homogeneous manner, but are arranged in bouts separated by pauses of responses between them. The temporal organization of these patterns, however, had been not successfully described. The present article introduces time-series modeling attempt for bout-pause pattern, which was presented in Matsui, Yamada, Sakagami, & Tanno (2018). Furthermore, the author argued that unsolved problems concerning bout-pause literatures, concerning quantification and modeling of bout-pause patterns. As remedies for these issues, the author discusses the utilities of reinforcement learning model and computational ethology for operant studies.

Computational psychiatry is an interdisciplinary field that applies computational approaches to the research of mental disorders. The four types of generative models used in computational psychiatry and the benefits of using generative models were explained. As an example of computational psychiatry research, a latent cause model in the return of fear was explained. Latent causal models are generative models of the process by which organisms infer latent causes from observed data, and can explain fear conditioning. As the future challenges in computational psychiatry, the making open of data, analysis codes, and materials and methods for accumulating knowledge about computational psychiatry were discussed.

In recent years, the importance of tactile stimulation/haptics has increased in various research fields. Psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have great difficulty controlling tactile stimulation in experiments, in contrast to visual and auditory stimulation. Unlike studies involving audiovisual stimulation, there is no standardized tactile stimulation device, such as a computer display or speaker, which can be purchased anywhere and then controlled easily by any personal computer. In this article, methods of controlling tactile stimulation using vibration, electrical stimulation, and touch on the various materials are introduced. The methods introduced do not completely overcome the difficulty of controlling tactile stimulation in experiments; therefore, psychologists must expend further effort to develop a standardized method. More active collaboration with engineering/robotics researchers and commercial companies will play an important role in this standardization.