An experiment on visual and auditory memory for 10-digit series was conducted under forward and backward rehearsal/recall conditions. The disits were visually and/or auditory presented at a 1.6 sec. rate, and the recall was done by writing them at a 1.2 sec. rate. There were five presentation methods, that is, a visual, an auditory, an audio-visual, an alternate, and a halving presentations. Under the forward rehearsal/recall conditions, performance for the audio-visual presentation was equal to that for the visual one, and they were superior to that for the auditory one. Performance for the alternate and the halving presentations were lower and higher than that for the audio-visual one, respectively. Under the backward rehearsal/recall conditions, two components were appeared in backward serial position curve. Performance in the first component showed no difference among five presentation methods, whereas that in the second one showed clear differences among them. The first and second components may be correspond to short-term and long-term memory.

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Vibrotactile adaptation was measured on four human subjects at the middle finger and the thenar eminence of the left hand, using six sinusoidal stimuli between 10Hz and 300Hz. The amount of adaptation at the thenar eminence was significantly greater than that at the middle finger under all frequency conditions. On the other hand it is known in neurophysiology that the density of mechanoreceptive units increases from palm to finger tip. From the results of our study and from neurophysiological findings, it was concluded that the main factor determining the adaptation amount was the number of mechanoreceptive units which took part in psychological response, and that the greater the number of mechanoreceptive units participating in the response, the smaller the adaptation amount became.

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Two experiments investigated factors influencing the integration of sentences. A priming technique using sentence recognition was employed. The experimental procedure involved presenting four to-be-remembered sentences to the subjects and then testing two sentences successively for recognition. In the experiment 1, positive priming effect was observed when two test sentences shared same subject noun (same subject condition), whereas negative priming effect was obtained in the same verb condition. Results of experiment 2 showed no significant priming effect in the same object condition. These results suggest that two sentences are integrated when they share same subject noun. A tentative model based on repetition rule and spreading activation explanation was briefly discussed.

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Studies concerning the origin of spatial perception are reviewed. The "touch-dominance" theories (ex. Berkeley) and the "vision-dominance" theories (ex. Rock and Harris) are found to be analogous in that they simply attribute the origin of space to a particular modality and explain space perception in other sensory modalities by association. It is argued that these "modality-dominance" theories will not be sufficient to explain the genetic mechanisms underlying learning/adapting processes of the perceptual localization of self and objects. A possibility of other type of theory is explored in the "inverted/reversed vision" and prism adaptation studies. Implications of phenomena, such as the dissociation of visual and tactile selves (Stratton, Makino), the piecemeal perception (Kohler) are discussed. The tentative conclusions are; (a) the mechanisms which are responsible for reorganization of perceptual space are at a lower level than that of mental imagery, and (b) they are closely related to the body scheme.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate hierarchical structure of concepts which was the basic organization of human knowledge. In order to compare two different types of hierarchy (concrete-abstract hierarchy and part-whole hierarchy), 40 subjects were asked to list kinds of 12 concepts and the other 40 subjects were asked to list parts of those. The concepts were divided into biological categories, object categories and scene categories. Results revealed that while more kinds were listed for the biological categories, more parts were listed for the scene categories. The conclusion was that concepts were organized into the two types of hierarchy, and that the two structures were different in salience among the categories. It was suggested that the difference was due to the relationship between superordinate- and subordinate-concepts and to the internal structures among subordinate-concepts.

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The effects of inaccurate instructions on the differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) performance of human subjects were investigated. The inaccurate instructions were divided into two types, i.e., the instruction which leads subjects to contact aversive consequence and the instruction which leads them to contact no clear aversive consequence. In this study, those two types of instructions were presented within a session on three-component multiple DRL schedules. Results indicated that the instruction resulting in aversive consequence caused subjects to respond according to schedule contingencies more quickly than the instruction resulting in no aversive consequence. The usefulness of the inaccurate instruction resulting in aversive consequence to eliminate the instruction-following behavior was emphasized.

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