Taiji Ueno

Abstract The COVID pandemic has been an unforeseen situation in which uncertainty, social distance, loss of stability, and significant changes have proven to have detrimental effects on people's well‐being and on mental health. The aim of the present study is to determine changes in subjective time speed, duration, and time distance, and to consider the factors that may have contributed to this subjective distortion. A questionnaire was designed to explore time perception along with autobiographical recollection, mental and physical activity, and mood before, during, and after the pandemic. Analysis revealed that the pandemic period differed from before and after on every scale; subjects reported relatively lower values on autobiographical memory for the pandemic period; felt this time period to be further away, slower, and longer; were less active; and had a more negative mood. A structural equation model revealed that mood was the main predictor of subjective time distortion.

Humans can pronounce a nonword (e.g., rint). Some researchers have interpreted this behavior as requiring a sequential mechanism by which a grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule is applied to each grapheme in turn. However, several parallel-distributed processing (PDP) models in English have simulated human nonword reading accuracy without a sequential mechanism. Interestingly, the Japanese psycholinguistic literature went partly in the same direction, but it has since concluded that a sequential parsing mechanism is required to reproduce human nonword reading accuracy. In this study, by manipulating the list composition (i.e., pure word/nonword list vs. mixed list), we demonstrated that past psycholinguistic studies in Japanese have overestimated human nonword reading accuracy. When the more fairly reevaluated human performance was targeted, a newly implemented Japanese PDP model simulated the target accuracy as well as the error patterns. These findings suggest that PDP models are a more parsimonious way of explaining reading across various languages.

In recent years an increasing number of articles have employed meta-analysis to integrate effect sizes of researchers' own series of studies within a single article ("internal meta-analysis"). Although this approach has the obvious advantage of obtaining narrower confidence intervals, we show that it could inadvertently inflate false-positive rates if researchers are motivated to use internal meta-analysis in order to obtain a significant overall effect. Specifically, if one decides whether to stop or continue a further replication experiment depending on the significance of the results in an internal meta-analysis, false-positive rates would increase beyond the nominal level. We conducted a set of Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate our argument, and provided a literature review to gauge awareness and prevalence of this issue. Furthermore, we made several recommendations when using internal meta-analysis to make a judgment on statistical significance.

Intrusive thoughts and difficulty in controlling thoughts are common, not only for people with psychological disorders, but also for healthy people. Individual differences in thought control ability may underlie such problems. The Thought Control Ability Questionnaire (TCAQ), which consists of 25 items, was developed by Luciano et al. (2005) in order to measure individual differences in the perceived ability to control unwanted intrusive thoughts. The purpose of the present study was to develop the Japanese version of the TCAQ and evaluate its reliability and validity. We translated the English version of the TCAQ into Japanese. We also conducted confirmatory factor analysis with a one factor solution, similar to the previous study. Based on the analysis, we excluded items whose factor loadings were lower than. 30, resulting in 22 items for the Japanese version of the TCAQ. The model exhibited acceptable goodness-of-fit. The Japanese version of the TCAQ also demonstrated good reliability as well as evidence of construct validity. Thus, the development of the Japanese version of the TCAQ was successful.

Semantic memory is a crucial higher cortical function that codes the meaning of objects and words, and when impaired after neurological damage, patients are left with significant disability. Investigations of semantic dementia have implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) region, in general, as crucial for multimodal semantic memory. The potentially crucial role of the ventral ATL subregion has been emphasized by recent functional neuroimaging studies, but the necessity of this precise area has not been selectively tested. The implantation of subdural electrode grids over this subregion, for the presurgical assessment of patients with partial epilepsy or brain tumor, offers the dual yet rare opportunities to record cortical local field potentials while participants complete semantic tasks and to stimulate the functionally identified regions in the same participants to evaluate the necessity of these areas in semantic processing. Across 6 patients, and utilizing a variety of semantic assessments, we evaluated and confirmed that the anterior fusiform/inferior temporal gyrus is crucial in multimodal, receptive, and expressive, semantic processing.

It is well established that the phonological system captures the quasiregularity of phoneme sequences. For example, repetition performance is better for nonwords composed of phoneme combinations that occur frequently in one's native language. Although phoneme sequences are necessarily accompanied by suprasegmental aspects (e.g., accent patterns), the influence of suprasegmental aspects has not been investigated extensively. This study examined the influence of Japanese pitch-accent pattern on nonword repetition. Exploration of nonwords provides an opportunity to investigate phonological factors largely without lexical and semantic influences. We conducted immediate and delayed nonword repetition experiments, manipulating phonotactic frequency and pitch-accent type. Two experiments revealed that nonwords presented with atypical accent patterns showed more frequent phonemic and accent pattern errors than nonwords with more typical accent patterns. The results indicate that the phonological system captures a range of sublexical phonological characteristics found in each language through linguistic experiences and is not limited to coding phonemic sequences alone. We suggest that although there is diversity in functioning of phonological systems driven by linguistic variability, such diversity stems from universal learning mechanisms in language processing systems.

Many previous studies have explored and confirmed the influence of long-term phonological representations on phonological short-term memory. In most investigations, phonological effects have been explored with respect to phonotactic constraints or frequency. If interaction between long-term memory and phonological short-term memory is a generalized principle, then other phonological characteristics-that is, suprasegmental aspects of phonology-should also exert similar effects on phonological short-term memory. We explored this hypothesis through three immediate serial-recall experiments that manipulated Japanese nonwords with respect to lexical prosody (pitch-accent type, reflecting suprasegmental characteristics) as well as phonotactic frequency (reflecting segmental characteristics). The results showed that phonotactic frequency affected the retention not only of the phonemic sequences, but also of pitch-accent patterns, when participants were instructed to recall both the phoneme sequence and accent pattern of nonwords. In addition, accent pattern typicality influenced the retention of the accent pattern: Typical accent patterns were recalled more accurately than atypical ones. These results indicate that both long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge contribute to phonological short-term memory performance.

A visual object can be conceived of as comprising a number of features bound together by their joint spatial location. We investigate the question of whether the spatial location is automatically bound to the features or whether the two are separable, using a previously developed paradigm whereby memory is disrupted by a visual suffix. Participants were shown a sample array of four colored shapes, followed by a postcue indicating the target for recall. On randomly intermixed trials, a to-be-ignored suffix array consisting of two different colored shapes was presented between the sample and the postcue. In a random half of suffix trials, one of the suffix items overlaid the location of the target. If location was automatically encoded, one might expect the colocation of target and suffix to differentially impair performance. We carried out three experiments, cuing for recall by spatial location (Experiment 1), color or shape (Experiment 2), or both randomly intermixed (Experiment 3). All three studies showed clear suffix effects, but the colocation of target and suffix was differentially disruptive only when a spatial cue was used. The results suggest that purely visual shape-color binding can be retained and accessed without requiring information about spatial location, even when task demands encourage the encoding of location, consistent with the idea of an abstract and flexible visual working memory system.

Research on memory has demonstrated that remembering material can cause forgetting of related information, which is known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). Macrae and Roseveare identified "self" as one of the boundary conditions of this effect in the Western cultural context, showing that RIF was eliminated when material was encoded to be related to the self (known as self-referential effect), but not to significant others. In this study, we predicted and found that significant others could be another boundary condition in Japanese cultural contexts in which self and agency are more interdependent or conjoint; RIF was observed neither under best-friend-related encoding nor under family-related encoding in Japan. The effect of significant others is found uniquely in Japanese cultural contexts, suggesting that the cultural model of self has significant power in the spontaneous system of memory.

The emergentist-connectionist approach assumes that language processing reflects interaction between primary neural systems (Primary Systems Hypothesis). This idea offers an overarching framework that generalizes to various kinds of (English) language and nonverbal cognitive activities. The current study advances this approach with respect to language in two new and important ways. The first is the provision of a neuroanatomically constrained implementation of the theory. The second is a test of its ability to generalize to a language other than English (in this case Japanese) and, in particular, to a feature of that language (pitch accent) for which there is no English equivalent. A corpus analysis revealed the presence and distribution of typical and atypical accent forms in Japanese vocabulary, forming a quasiregular domain. Consequently, according to the Primary Systems Hypothesis, there should be a greater semantic impact on the processing of words with an atypical pitch accent. In turn, when word meaning is intrinsically less rich (e.g., abstract words), speakers should be prone to regularization errors of pitch accent. We explored these semantic-phonological interactions, first, in a neuroanatomically constrained, parallel-distributed processing model of spoken language processing. This model captured the accent typicality effect observed in nonword repetition in Japanese adults and children and exhibited the predicted semantic impact on repetition of words with atypical accent patterns. Second, also as predicted, in word repetition and immediate serial recall of spoken words, human participants exhibited reduced pitch-accent accuracy and/or slower RT for low imageability words with atypical accent patterns, and they generated accent errors reflecting the more typical accent patterns found in Japanese.

Caplan and colleagues have recently explained paired-associate learning and serial-order learning with a single-mechanism computational model by assuming differential degrees of isolation. Specifically, two items in a pair can be grouped together and associated to positional codes that are somewhat isolated from the rest of the items. In contrast, the degree of isolation among the studied items is lower in serial-order learning. One of the key predictions drawn from this theory is that any variables that help chunking of two adjacent items into a group should be beneficial to paired-associate learning, more than serial-order learning. To test this idea, the role of visual representations in memory for spoken verbal materials (i.e., imagery) was compared between two types of learning directly. Experiment 1 showed stronger effects of word concreteness and of concurrent presentation of irrelevant visual stimuli (dynamic visual noise: DVN) in paired-associate memory than in serial-order memory, consistent with the prediction. Experiment 2 revealed that the irrelevant visual stimuli effect was boosted when the participants had to actively maintain the information within working memory, rather than feed it to long-term memory for subsequent recall, due to cue overloading. This indicates that the sensory input from irrelevant visual stimuli can reach and affect visual representations of verbal items within working memory, and that this disruption can be attenuated when the information within working memory can be efficiently supported by long-term memory for subsequent recall.

Ever since the 19th century, the standard model for spoken language processing has assumed two pathways for repetition-a phonological pathway and a semantic pathway-and this idea has gained further support in the last decade. First, recent in vivo tractography studies have demonstrated both the "dorsal" (via arcuate fasciculus) and "ventral" (via extreme capsule and uncinate fasciculus) pathways connecting from the primary auditory area to the speech-motor area, the latter of which passes through a brain area associated with semantic processing (anterior temporal lobe). Secondly, neuropsychological evidence for the role of semantics in repetition is conduite d'approche, a successive phonological improvement (sometimes non-improvement) in aphasic patients' response by repeating several times in succession. Crucially, conduite d'approche is observed in patients with neurological damage in/around the arcuate fasciculus. Successful conduite d'approche is especially clear for semantically-intact patients and it occurs for real words rather than for non-words. These features have led researchers to hypothesize that the patients' disrupted phonological output is "cleaned-up" by intact lexical-semantic information before the next repetition. We tested this hypothesis using the neuroanatomically-constrained dual dorsal-ventral pathway computational model. The results showed that (a) damage to the dorsal pathway impaired repetition; (b) in the context of recovery, the model learned to compute a correct repetition response following the model's own noisy speech output (i.e., successful conduite d'approche); (c) this behavior was more evident for real words than non-words; and (d) activation from the ventral pathway contributed to the increased rate of successful conduite d'approche for real words. These results suggest that lexical-semantic "clean-up" is key to this self-correcting mechanism, supporting the classic proposal of two pathways for repetition.

Traditional neurological models of language were based on a single neural pathway (the dorsal pathway underpinned by the arcuate fasciculus). Contemporary neuroscience indicates that anterior temporal regions and the "ventral" language pathway also make a significant contribution, yet there is no computationally-implemented model of the dual pathway, nor any synthesis of normal and aphasic behavior. The "Lichtheim 2" model was implemented by developing a new variety of computational model which reproduces and explains normal and patient data but also incorporates neuroanatomical information into its architecture. By bridging the "mind-brain" gap in this way, the resultant "neurocomputational" model provides a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between lesion location and behavioral deficits, and to provide a platform for simulating functional neuroimaging data.

A series of experiments explored the mechanisms determining the encoding and storage of features and objects in visual working memory. We contrasted the effects of three types of visual suffix on cued recall of a display of colored shapes. The suffix was presented after the display and before the recall cue. The latter was either the color or shape of one of the objects and signaled recall of the object's other feature. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found a larger effect of 'plausible' suffixes comprising features (color and shape) drawn from the experimental set, relative to the effect of 'implausible' suffixes comprising features outside the experimental set. Experiment 3 extended this pattern by showing that 'semi-plausible' suffixes containing only one feature (either color or shape) from the experimental set had an equivalent effect to those with both features from the set. Reduction in accuracy was mainly due to an increase in recall of suffix features, rather than within-display confusions. The findings suggest a feature-based filtering process in visual working memory, with any stimuli that pass through this filter serving to directly overwrite existing object representations. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Current research increasingly suggests that spatial cognition in humans is accomplished by many specialized mechanisms, each designed to solve a particular adaptive problem. A major adaptive problem for our hominin ancestors, particularly females, was the need to efficiently gather immobile foods which could vary greatly in quality, quantity, spatial location and temporal availability. We propose a cognitive model of a navigational gathering adaptation in humans and test its predictions in samples from the US and Japan. Our results are uniformly supportive: the human mind appears equipped with a navigational gathering adaptation that encodes the location of gatherable foods into spatial memory. This mechanism appears to be chronically active in women and activated under explicit motivation in men. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In a series of five experiments, we studied the effect of a visual suffix on the retention in short-term visual memory of both individual visual features and objects involving the binding of two features. Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2 involved suffixes consisting of features external to the to-be-remembered set and revealed a modest but equivalent disruption on individual and bound feature conditions. Experiments 3A and 3B involved suffixes comprising features that could potentially have formed part of the to-be-remembered set (but did not on that trial). Both experiments showed greater disruption of retention for objects comprising bound features than for their individual features. The results are interpreted as differentiating two components of suffix interference, one affecting memory for features and bindings equally, the other affecting memory for bindings. The general component is tentatively identified with the attentional cost of operating a filter to prevent the suffix from entering visual working memory, whereas the specific component is attributed to the particular fragility of bound representations when the filter fails.

In a nonword serial recall experiment we found following results: (1) Phonotactically high frequent nonwords were recalled better than low ones in terms of phoneme accuracy; (2) but this phonotactic frequency effect was not observed in accent accuracy. (3) Accent typicality did not have an expected effect on phoneme recall accuracy; (4) but it had an effect on accent accuracy. These results suggest that both long-term knowledge about phoneme sequences and accent patterns have strong influences on verbal short-term memory performance, but those influences might be limited to each particular domain.