Repetition blindness is defined as difficulty detecting repeated targets within an array of stimuli. However, it is unclear how emotion affects this phenomenon. In the present study, participants were exposed to happy and angry faces, and non-emotional stimuli shown in rapid serial visual presentation. They were required to identify the repeated targets, and the magnitude of repetition blindness was measured to indicate emotional effects. Analysis showed that, while there was no difference in accuracy between happy and angry faces on non-repeated trials, accuracy was significantly lower for angry faces on repeated trials inducing greater repetition blindness. This effect was stronger when the stimulus exposure rate was 150 msec, suggesting its early processes and strong capturing of attention. These results show that repetition blindness effect was stronger with angry faces, which is likely due to enhanced emotional alertness and increase in intensity of the processes inducing greater repetition blindness.

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Regret is a painful experience. In order to manage regret, previous studies showed that older people were more likely to change their cognitions than change the situations, compared to younger people. This age difference in the management of regret may affect what exactly people regret, though the nature of situations may constrain the age effect. In this study, Japanese adults (N = 815, age range: 20-85 years) reported the greatest regret of their lives via an internet survey. As the results, older people were more likely to regret their acts of commissions than younger people in the domain of self, whereas no age effect emerged in the interpersonal domain. Moreover, content analyses showed (i) higher proportions of regret related to interpersonal relationships than found by previous studies, and (ii) main effects of age and educational level on regret. We discussed the experience of regret during each stage of life.

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We investigated the effect of working memory capacity and mental effort on the ability to monitor the accuracy of text comprehension. Participants completed the operation span test to measure working memory capacity (WMC) and read five scientific expository texts. In low-effort condition, participants read intact texts, whereas in high-effort condition, participants read texts that had some letters deleted. After reading, participants assigned comprehension rating to each text and then completed a comprehension test. The result showed a significant interaction between WMC and mental effort. Increased effort improved the accuracy of low-WMC readers but decreased the accuracy of high-WMC readers. Further, in low-effort condition, high-WMC readers monitored their comprehension more accurately than did low-WMC readers. In high-effort condition, low-WMC readers monitored their comprehension more accurately than did high-WMC readers. Our findings showed that both WMC and mental effort affected the ability of participants to monitor their accuracy. These findings are discussed.

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In the present study, children in the age group of 3-5 years had to perform a source-monitoring task, a cognitive shifting task and an inhibitory control task, and the correlations between the tasks were examined. In the source-monitoring task, children were asked to discriminate objects they acted on (internal source) from objects an experimenter acted on (external source). They were also administered the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task as a cognitive shifting and Black/White task as an inhibitory control task. We found that there was a significant correlation between the measure on the external source and the performances in the DCCS task. The results indicated that cognitive shifting may play an important role in source monitoring where children have to discriminate internal sources from external sources.

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Two experiments exploring the structure of bilingual memory as a function of second language proficiency and distance between the two languages are reported. Experiment 1, manipulating categorization of word lists, explored bi-directional translation in Japanese-English, two distantly related languages, while Experiment 2 did the same using Japanese- Korean as more closely related languages. The findings, indicating that asymmetry of translation occurs only in more proficient Japanese-English bilinguals (Expt. 1), while occurring at both levels of proficiency Japanese-Korean bilinguals (Expt. 2), provide support for the asymmetric model of links between lexical and conceptual systems of bilingual memory (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). They demonstrate that the functional architecture of the model alters with changes in second language proficiency. The findings also indicate that the relationship between the two languages of a bilingual plays an important role in the nature and lexical organization of the mental lexicon.

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