The purpose of this study was to examine whether salient natural scenes attract both younger and older adults’ attention in a visual search task. We manipulated the search set size and the perceptual saliency of the target scene (singleton vs. nonsingleton). In the singleton condition, a target image was always presented in color, and distractors were presented in grayscale. In the nonsingleton condition, both target and distractor images were presented in color. Younger and older adults were asked to detect the target in scenes and to categorize it as an animal or vehicle. The results showed that, although older adults’ decisions were slower than those of younger adults, older adults could still perform visual search efficiently in the singleton condition as compared with the nonsingleton condition. These results suggest that salient natural scenes attract both younger and older adults’ attention in scene perception based on the relatively bottom-up attentional processing.

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Recent studies assessing working memory suggest that sentence representations can support recall during reading span tests (RST). However, mechanisms underlying this positive effect have not been precisely identified. The present study examined the influence of sentence representations on recall performance during an RST by manipulating both, the type of target words (focus or non-focus words within the sentence) and word frequency of non-target sentence words. Results showed that (1) recall performance was lower for the low-frequency RST, where a non-target was a low-frequency word, than for a high-frequency RST; (2) there was a robust focus effect, with an advantage for focus words compared to non-focus targets; and (3) there were no interactions between the frequency and focus manipulations. The results indicate that sentence representations have an important role in RST performance.

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Human cognitive functions are associated with health conditions and lifestyles in daily living. However, little is known about how cognitive functions in healthy elderly people are correlated with their health conditions and daily lifestyles. This study investigated this issue. The study involved 85 healthy older adults, who were examined for memory and frontal-lobe functions. Additionally, their subjective health-related QOL (HQOL) and lifestyles were assessed, including the physical, intellectual, and social activities in daily lives. This study yielded three main findings. First, HQOL scores were positively correlated with scores for memory and frontal-lobe tasks. Second, older adults whose daily lives included moderate physical activity showed better memory functions than those with high and low levels of physical activity. Third, participants who engaged in a higher frequency of intellectual and social activities had better memory and frontal-lobe functions. Individual differences in subjective health condition and lifestyles could predict cognitive abilities in elderly.

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The present study served two purposes. First of all, the reliability and validity of a variant of the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) adapted to Asian samples was tested. Secondly, we aimed at assessing prejudice towards Koreans by means of the AMP and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as well as different self-report measures. The AMP variant was reliable and showed meaningful correlations with some self-report measures, but not with the IAT. Furthermore, both in the AMP and the IAT, participants demonstrated prejudice against Koreans, whereas the self-report measures showed a less consistent pattern of prejudice. Our discussion focuses on chances and challenges of using indirect and direct measures in Asian samples.

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It has been suggested that individualistic systems have been recently employed in Japan, and Japanese people have become more individualistic. However, previous research suggested that such cultural changes have negative associations with interpersonal relationships and happiness for Japanese (Ogihara & Uchida, 2014). In the present research, to demonstrate a negative aspect of individualism in Japan, we examined the meaning of individualism which Japanese people hold. Japanese participants aged 16 to 69 reported their evaluation to the word “individualism” and their perception of an “individualistic person.” We found that individualism was regarded as being neutral and ambivalent, including both the positive aspect of being “with independence and freedom” and the negative aspect of being “without positive interpersonal relationships.” In contrast, participants predicted others’ evaluation of individualism to be more negative than their own evaluation, since they presumed that others would not consider the positive aspect of independence and freedom.

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