Alterations of Physiological Attention Indicators via Ventilation Pattern Manipulation in ERP-Based Brain-Computer Interface
Dogeun Park1, Young-Gi Ju1, Dong-Ok Won1,2,*
1Department of Artificial Intelligence Convergence, Hallym University, 2College of Medicine, Hallym University, Korea
*Correspondence : dongok.won@hallym.ac.kr
Event-related potential (ERP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) speller is one of the representative methods for implementing BCI. ERP-based BCI is an endogenous attention-based paradigm that has the advantage of achieving high accuracy without intensive user training. However, ERP-based speller tasks consume a lot of time due to data acquisition through a large number of trials. Furthermore, this can lead to poor character recognition performance via eye and cognitive exhaustion. This is contrary to the original purpose with regard to multiple trials of data acquisition. One previous study showed enhanced performance through six minutes of meditative mindfulness induction. Another study showed that respiratory patterns using cyclic sighing for 5 minutes were more effective than mindfulness meditation in terms of reducing physiological arousal in daily use and long-term perspective. Therefore, we assumed that ventilation manipulation using cyclic sighing could change the user’s cognitive state and enhance performance. To test the feasibility of the proposed method, a total of five subjects participated in the experiment. Each subject was requested to experience two sessions, and each session consists of a proposed and a normal condition. A regularized linear discriminant analysis with shrinkage was applied for character classification. For further analysis, the Welch’s method and the composite Simpson’s rule were applied to estimate band power and the theta/beta ratio (TBR). This study demonstrates that the proposed condition using cyclic sighing performs better than the normal condition in regard to character recognition accuracy on average. Furthermore, we showed low TBR under all subjects’ conditions except for the second session of subject 4. In general, TBR and attention control have negative correlations. Thus, this provides additional explanatory power for the causal effect between physiological attention alterations and character recognition accuracy. Even though statistical analysis will be required in the future, this result is encouraging for future research.
An intrinsic high-temporal-resolution representation for inter-areal theta-gamma couplings in visual working memory
Wei-Kuang Liang1,*, Chong-Chih Tsai2, Chi-Hung Juan3
1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Central University, Taiwan, 2Department of Psychiatry, Taoyuan Armed Forces General Hospital, Taiwan, 3Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Central University, Taiwan
* Correspondence : weikuangliang@gmail.com
The inter-areal theta-gamma cross-frequency coupling is an oscillatory characteristic related to the process of visual working memory (VWM). However, for a brain function such as VWM that operates within seconds, the representation of instantaneous oscillatory characteristics requires further enhancement so that temporal dynamical changes of within- and cross-frequency neural correlates can be revealed. In this study, we investigated VWM of feature-integration objects by manipulating VWM loads and distractions, and employed a high-temporal-resolution Holo-Hilbert cross-frequency phase clustering (HHCFPC) method (Liang et al., 2021; Jaiswal et al., 2023) based on a process of two-layer EMD (Huang et al., 2016) on source-level EEG data to measure inter-areal theta-gamma couplings during VWM maintenance. The results reveal an underlying dynamical network of inter-areal theta-gamma phase clustering that serves as a neural correlate of maintaining integrated objects in VWM. In this dynamical network, the midcingulate cortex (MCC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the left superior and inferior parietal lobules (SPL and IPL) function as theta modulation hubs in the neural mechanism of theta-gamma cross-frequency couplings during VWM.
Online Cognition Networks in Collaborative Learning among Japanese Youngsters and Elders
Xanat Vargas Meza1,*, Shigen Shimojo2, Yugo Hayashi3
1 Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 2Graduate School of Human Science, Ritsumeikan University, Ibaraki, Japan, 3Department of Comprehensive Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Ibaraki, Japan
*Correspondence : kt_designbox@yahoo.com
In Japan, life and health expectancies are high while elderly population is expected to increase. Continuous activity and participation from such communities is estimated, included lifelong learning. Network science explores how network structure and the processes operating on it interact to generate behaviors, potentially providing a framework to model structural changes in cognitive systems. Therefore, the objective of this study was to provide a quantitative and qualitative comparison of Japanese youngsters and seniors cognitive networks. Key similarities and differences across Japanese and International literature were identified, providing insights for the design of assisted collaborative learning applications.
Predicting taste preference using regression-based decoding
Chaery Park*, Jongwan Kim
Department of Psychology, Jeonbuk National University, Korea
*Correspondence : sweet0527@jbnu.ac.kr
Research on individual’s taste preferences has been ongoing in the field of consumer science. However, there is relatively limited psychological research specifically focused on understanding the emotions evoked by different tastes and how they contribute to preference. A recent study (Park et al., 2023) showed that valence and arousal are successfully represented by four basic tastes. However, it is not clear if affective and gustatory responses can predict preference. In this study, we reanalyzed Park et al. (2023) data to investigate the identification of preference based on taste and emotion ratings. 30 students from Jeonbuk National University participated in this experiment. The stimuli consisted of commercial products corresponding to four basic tastes (sweet, bitter, sour, and salty). Participants were presented with each stimulus and rated their responses on taste, emotion, and preference scales. We conducted leave-one-out regression-based decoding. With the training dataset of 29 participants, we performed a regression analysis, treating the ratings of taste and emotion as independent variables, and the ratings of preference as dependent variables. To assess the predictive accuracy, the regression coefficients for the ratings of taste and emotion were multiplied by the corresponding testing dataset of the left-out participant. Predicted ratings of preference were obtained and correlated with the actual ratings of preference. This procedure was repeated for all participants to yield group prediction accuracy. The results revealed that combination of taste and emotions scale significantly predicted the preference, and each individual scale also significantly predicts the preference. The accuracy of the emotion scale was slightly higher than the taste scale, but there was no significant difference between them. The overall results indicate that emotion plays an important role in determining preference of food as much as the taste.
Differences between human and robot experimenters in creative problem solving: An experimental investigation focusing on the fear of negative evaluation
Lisa Abe1,*, Masasi Hattori2, Yugo Hayashi2
1Department of Human Science, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, 2College of Comprehensive Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
*Correspondence : lt0839ie@ed.ritsumei.ac.jp
In this study, we investigated how experimenter type (human or robot) influences task performance during creative problem-solving. We focused on whether participants think about having their work evaluated during the experiment (i.e., state anxiety) and whether they are likely to feel the fear of negative evaluation (i.e., trait anxiety). We examined the effects of these factors on the originality of their works as moderator variables. In an experiment, 36 university students were tasked to creatively draw as many creatures living on an outer planet as possible. Comparing the case where the experimenter was a human (i.e., human group) and the case where the experimenter was a robot (i.e., robot group), originality was higher in the human group than in the robot group. Another finding was that participants with higher state anxiety about negative evaluation showed more originality in the human group than in the robot group. Since the fear of negative evaluation was measured by responses to the items “I want to be approved by others” and “I am concerned about what other people think of me,” this finding may be due to people in the human group making more effort to be original to gain approval from the human experimenter. In contrast, the robot group participants may have felt that their work would be evaluated not by the robot but by someone else who was not there. Thus, those with high trait anxiety about evaluation may not have been able to fully demonstrate their abilities.
The Effect of Facial Expressions on Event Comprehension in Children with Different Empathy Skills
Ayaka Oshiro1,*, Tsuyoshi Kohatsu2, Akari Omine1, Amy J. Schafer3, Keiyu Niikuni4, Manami Sato1
1Okinawa International University, Japan, 2University of the Basque Country, Spain, 3University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, 4Niigata Seiryo University, Japan
*Correspondence : 2212m01@okiu.ac.jp
Empathy skills include the ability to understand others’ thoughts and emotions from facial expressions and to take others’ perspectives. These skills are acquired gradually but vary among individuals. This study investigates (1) how subliminal perception of others’ facial expressions affects perspective adoption in children’s understanding of transitive events, and (2) the role of individual empathy skills in perspective adoption. In a picture-sentence verification task, forty-four Japanese children from six to ten years old (Mean = 7.5) first subliminally saw either a smile or frown face (2 face conditions). Then they saw a picture depicting a transitive event followed by a sentence describing the event with either an active or a passive verb (2 voice conditions). They were asked to verify the congruency between the picture and the sentence by pressing a button as quickly and accurately as possible. They also completed the Cognitive and Emotional Empathy Scale for Children (CEES-C, Murakami et al., 2014). Children with relatively high scores on “sharing of others’ positive emotion,” a subscale of the CEES-C, responded faster to the active-voice sentences in the smile-face condition than in the frown-face condition, whereas they responded faster to the passive-voice sentences in the frown-face condition than in the smile-face condition. Children with relatively low scores on the subscale showed a different pattern: they responded faster to the active-voice sentences in the frown-face condition than in the smile-face condition. These results suggest that a smile face stimulates high-empathy children to understand an event (e.g., a dog pushing a cat) as if they were the agent of the action (e.g., the dog) while a frown face encourages low-empathy children to understand the event as if they were the patient (e.g., the cat).
Dual-Task Performance Investigation in Elderly Drivers
Yukiko Nishizaki*
Information and Human Sciences, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan
*Correspondence : yukikon@kit.ac.jp
Due to the limitation of cognitive resources, it is usually in a multitasking situation in which a participant performs multiple tasks simultaneously; his / her performance on the task is lower than when performing it alone. Multitasking behaviors such as smartphone operating while driving are a significant crisis. They are a major factor in causing severe accidents. With aging, cognitive resources decrease, making multitasking even more difficult. This study aimed to explore the characteristics of multitasking performance by the elderly. Experiments were conducted in which the participants performed calculations while driving on a monotonous road in a driving simulator. Most elderly participants increased the number of collisions when they performed the calculation task. On the contrary, about 30% of the participants had fewer collisions when they drove simultaneously with the calculation task than when they performed the driving task alone. They were represented by more mind-wandering when they were allowed to drive alone.
An estimation system for sentiment measures of news articles
Michio Nomura1,*, Daisuke Kawahara2, Masanobu Matsuo3
1Kyoto University, Japan, 2Waseda University, Japan, 3Kyoto Text Lab, Japan
*Correspondence : nomura.michio.8u@kyoto-u.ac.jp
A system for automatically estimating readers’ emotions towards news articles was constructed. First, an original dataset of 40,000 articles was constructed for sentiment indices of news articles. Then, using RoBERTa, a type of contextual language model based on deep neural networks, we performed a classification task for seven items (e.g. joy, fear, reliability, intentionality, etc.) for the articles and constructed a model that reached a practical level with a strong positive correlation between the predicted data and the measured data.
Facial Expressions Analysis for Revealing Cognitive Engagement During Monotonous Task
Md Masudul Hasan Polash1,*, Junya Morita2
1Department of Informatics, Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology Shizuoka University Hamamatsu, Japan, 2Department of Behavior Informatics, Faculty of Informatics Shizuoka University Hamamatsu, Japan
*Correspondence : masudul.hasan.22@shizuoka.ac.jp
Facial expressions play a significant role in conveying emotions and intentions, providing valuable insights into an individual’s internal state. This study aims to analyze facial expressions during the performance of the line-following task, a specialized cognitive activity involving sustained attention and focused mental effort. The objective is to gain a better understanding of how facial expressions can serve as non-verbal indicators of cognitive engagement, task performance, and emotional experiences during the task. The results indicate a distinct pattern of facial expressions during the line-following task. These insights have implications for understanding mental workload, engagement, and the subjective experience of participants’ emotions during cognitively demanding activities. We can utilize this knowledge to enhance task design, improve user experience, and optimize performance in various domains, including education, training, and human-computer interaction.
The relationship between social relationships and interpersonal distance
Kae Mukai1,*, Tomoko Isomura2, Katsumi Watanabe1
1Waseda University, Japan, 2Nagoya University, Japan
*Correspondence : kaemukai29@gmail.com
We unintentionally synchronize body with others when we act in a social environment. It has been reported that a distance between two persons affects interpersonal body synchrony. For instance, the interpersonal body synchrony is higher when the interpersonal distance is shorter. In the fields of social psychology and cognitive psychology, it has been shown that interpersonal distance varies depending on social relationships; two persons who are in a more intimate relationship tend to be physically closer. We examined whether interpersonal body synchrony would be influenced by the degree of intimacy even controlling the interpersonal distance. In addition, participants’ feeling of comfort at every interpersonal distance was examined to investigate the possible involvement of subjective feeling in the relationship between social relationship and interpersonal body synchrony. Twenty-six pairs of friends and loving couples participated in the study. They stood upright face-to-face or back-to-back for 50 seconds. There were 5 interpersonal distances (20, 40, 60, 80, 100 cm) in the face-to-face condition while it was 20 cm in the back-to-back condition. The center of pressure (COP) in the anterior-posterior direction was collected as an index of body sway. A cross-correlation analysis was then conducted on the time-series data of COP. The results showed that the participants generally tended to sway together more (i.e., showing higher interpersonal body synchrony) in the face-to-face condition than in the back-to-back condition. The interpersonal motor synchrony became higher as the interpersonal distance was shorter. While there was a difference in the feeling of comfort between the pairs of loving couples and the pairs of friends (i.e., the pairs of loving couples felt more comfortable in the face-to-face condition than the pairs of friends), there was no significant difference in the interpersonal synchrony in the face-to-face condition.
The effect of emotional clarity on mental health: the role of emotion regulation
Yoonwon Jung, Sumin Jung, Sowon Hahn*
Department of Psychology, Seoul National University, Korea
*Correspondence : swhahn@snu.ac.kr
Emotional clarity is conceptualized as a meta-emotional knowledge of one’s affective experiences. Emotional clarity has been recognized as a part of emotional intelligence that impacts mental health. Diminished emotional clarity is associated with depression, and emotional clarity positively affects well-being. However, empirical research exploring the underlying mechanisms of these associations remains limited. Integrating the research on emotional variability and the findings in positive psychology, this study proposes emotion regulation as a potential mediator in the relationship between emotional clarity and mental health-related variables. Therefore, the present study first replicated the association between emotional clarity and depression, as well as subjective well-being. We also tested the impact of emotional clarity on neuroticism, a personality trait detrimental to mental health. Then, we investigated the role of emotion regulation in explaining the psychological processes through which emotional clarity influences mental health outcomes. We used a sample of 94 participants who completed structured online surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Simple regression analyses revealed that higher levels of emotional clarity were associated with lower depression, higher subjective well-being, and lower neuroticism. Bootstrapped mediation analyses suggest that the association between emotional clarity and depression as well as neuroticism was mediated by negative emotion regulation. Catastrophizing, a discrete negative emotion regulation strategy, significantly mediated the relationship between emotional clarity and subjective well-being. The mediation effect of positive emotion regulation was statistically non-significant across all three dependent variables. Our findings enhance the understanding of how emotional clarity affects well-being, personality, and psychopathology by elucidating the mediating role of negative emotion regulation. This heightened comprehension of the psychological mechanisms carries implications for professionals in the field.
From Observer to Actor: Facial Expressions Affect Children’s Preferences in Perspective Adoption
Tsuyoshi Kohatsu1,*, Ayaka Oshiro2, Akari Omine2, Amy J. Schafer3, Keiyu Niikuni4, Manami Sato2
1University of the Basque Country, Spain, 2Okinawa International University, Japan, 3University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, 4Niigata Seiryo University, Japan
*Correspondence : tkohatsu001@ikasle.ehu.eus
With isolated sentences, adult Japanese-speaking comprehenders adopt an actor perspective for you-sentences, an observer perspective for s/he-sentences, and no particular perspective for null-subject sentences. In real-life communication, however, linguistic messages are accompanied by facial expressions. Recent comprehension research on Japanese null-subject sentences finds that, in line with the broaden-and-build hypothesis, brief exposure to positive faces broadens cognition, allowing adult comprehenders to adopt both actor and observer perspectives, while negative faces narrow cognition, preventing them from taking both perspectives. This study examines developmental stages of facial expression processing and perspective adoption with null-subject sentences while considering the individual empathy skills of child comprehenders. After brief exposure (17ms) to smile, neutral, or frown faces (3 face conditions), forty-four Japanese children from six to ten years old (Mean = 7.5) heard a Japanese null-subject action sentence, then saw a picture depicted from either an actor or an observer perspective (2 perspective conditions). They pressed 軻yes迦 if the picture correctly depicted the previously heard sentence. Because null-subject sentences linguistically specify no perspective, any perspective preference reflects the effects of the facial expressions on perspective adoption. The children responded significantly faster to observer-perspective pictures than to actor-perspective ones in the neutral-face condition (1297.4ms vs. 1465.6ms, p = .010), while there was no significant difference in RTs between the actor-perspective and observer-perspective pictures, in both frown-face (1414.8ms vs. 1390.6ms, p = .600) and smile-face (1353.8ms vs. 1304.2ms, p = .339) conditions. These results suggest that, regardless of emotion type, perceiving subliminal facial expressions encouraged the children to understand events from an actor perspective. We discuss observed differences between children and adults in the effects of subliminal facial priming on cognitive processing and subsequent perspective adoption during language comprehension in Japanese.
Effectiveness of Problem-solving Indigenous Language Teaching Approach: Employing the Silent Way in Truku Seediq as an example
Apay Ai-yu Tang*
Department of Indigenous Languages and Communications, College of Indigenous Studies, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan
*Correspondence : apay@gms.ndhu.edu.tw
A major obstacle to revitalize the indigenous languages in Taiwan is the absence of an effective language teaching approach. The purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of problem-solving indigenous language teaching approach employing the Silent Way in Truku Seediq as an example to assess the student learning, performance and achievement as well as to determine whether the problem-solving language teaching is more effective than other methods in a multilingual context such as Taiwan. The Silent Way is a language teaching approach that promotes greatest learning involving processing of material to be learned at the greatest amount of problem-solving activity and cognitive depth. Other than some other methods where repetition and memorization are stressed, this approach arouses opportunities for learners to utilize many cognitive strategies such as creatively searching out, discovering and depicting. A learner is expected to become independent, autonomous responsible throughout the language learning process. Namely, s/he realizes a language with his or her own perceptual and analytical powers through grappling with the problem of forming an appropriate and meaningful utterance in a new language. Two elementary Truku students’ language competence development were observed within a semester; one focuses on the learning of sounds and the other on that of sentences. The respective indicator of evaluating their individual language competence was the accuracy of sounds and the development of the mean length of utterance of sentences before and after the 10-week Truku course. Moreover, the teacher’s reflections and interview were also observed to especially assess students’ effectiveness and use of problem-solving strategies in indigenous language learning. As predicted, both students produced higher accuracy of sounds or higher mean length of utterance of sentences after than before taking Truku language course employing the Silent Way language teaching approach―suggesting the need for employing a problem-solving language teaching approach as an alternative and effective indigenous language teaching method if the indigenous languages are to survive for another generation in Taiwan.
A visual attention span deficit and functional brain bases of dyslexic children in Japanese
Akiko Sugimoto1,*, Mitsuyo Shibasaki2, Hiroshi Yoshida3, Hikaru Sugimoto4
1Faculty of Education, Meisei University, Japan, 2Faculty of Psychology, Meisei University, Japan, 3Faculty of Contemporary Culture, Hijiyama University, Japan, 4Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan
*Correspondence : akikos@ed.meisei-u.ac.jp
Numerous studies have been conducted to elucidate the cognitive deficits underlying dyslexia and the associated neurological bases, especially in regard to people with dyslexia in alphabetic writing systems, and have suggested that a phonological deficit is a main cause of dyslexia. In contrast, recent research focusing on a visual attention span deficit (VAS deficit) have indicated that visual impairments can also be a candidate as a cause of dyslexia. Nevertheless, there remains a controversy concerning whether a VAS deficit can be accepted as a cause of dyslexia. Studies investigating the presence of comparable cognitive impairments and underlying neurological mechanisms in not only alphabetic scripts, but also non-alphabetic scripts, may shed light on the etiology of dyslexia. This study examined whether a VAS deficit would be found as a cognitive disorder in Japanese dyslexic children, and if so, where is the functional brain bases behind them through experiments using fNIRS with Japanese dyslexic 6th grade elementary school students and typical developing 2nd, 4th and 6th graders in elementary schools and adults. The analysis results of behavioral data suggested that dyslexic children in Japanese possess a VAS deficit as well as a phonological deficit, which is the same as dyslexia in alphabetical writing systems. In addition, the fNIRS data analysis results of VAS tasks showed that dyslexic 6 graders showed lower activation than typical readers in 4th grade in the left Broca’s area and the left Supramarginal gyrus part of Wernicke‘s area, 6th-grade typical readers in the bilateral Angular gyrus and the left V3, and adult typical readers in the bilateral Supramarginal gyrus part of Wernicke‘s area, Angular gyrus, V1, V2, V3, and the left Broca’s area and Fusiform gyrus. The results indicated that Japanese dyslexic children show decreased activation in the similar brain regions as dyslexia in alphabetical languages.
Parafoveal Semantic Preview Effect in Reading of Chinese-Korean Bilinguals
Shang Wang1,*, Hyeree Choo1, Sungryong Koh1,2
1Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Sciences, Seoul National University, Korea, 2Department of Psychology, Seoul National University, Korea
*Correspondence : babycat0726@snu.ac.kr
This study aims to ascertain whether the semantic information of a word presented in the parafoveal region (the area to the right of the fovea where the gaze is fixed) is extracted prior to the fixation of the gaze during the reading process, thereby conferring a benefit, known as the semantic preview effect. Drawing upon the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), this study explores the possibility of semantic information extraction from the parafoveal preview when Chinese-Korean bilinguals read Korean sentences. In order to observe the semantic effects of reading, Sino-Korean vocabulary—Korean words of Chinese origin that are semantically linked with Chinese—was used in experimentally designed sentences intermixed with Chinese and Korean. The target word used in the experiment was a three-character Korean word. In Experiment 1, there were four types of previews: identical, Korean synonymous, Chinese synonymous, Chinese unrelated. The experiment showed a significant difference between the Chinese synonymous preview condition and unrelated preview condition, indicating the existence of an effect of semantic preview (first fixation duration, b= -51.66, SE=8.80, t= -5.87, p< .001; single fixation duration, b= -82.18, SE =13.50, t= -6.09, p< .001; gaze duration, b= -207.79, SE=17.44, t= -11.92, p< .001). In Experiment 2, this study further examined semantic preview effects with a semantically related word as a preview. There were four types of previews: identical, Chinese related, Chinese synonymous, Chinese unrelated. The results revealed a significant effect of semantic preview as all of the reported measures on the target region were shorter not only in the Chinese synonymous preview condition, but also in the Chinese semantically related condition (first fixation duration, b= -31.99, SE=7.81, t= -4.09, p< .001; single fixation duration, b= -65.81, SE =13.10, t= -5.02, p< .001; gaze duration, b= -91.95, SE=14.74, t= -6.24, p< .001). Moreover, the traditional preview effect of identical preview words was shown to be affected by Chinese semantic previews. These results of both experiments indicate that Chinese readers would extract semantic information from the parafovea.
The Role of Animacy in the Acquisition of Korean Plural Marking by Chinese L2 Learners of Korean
Kim Soyoung
Department of Global Cultural Contents, Tongmyong University, Pusan, Korea
*Correspondence : ginlovego7@gmail.com
This study explores Korean plural marking on nouns with animacy distinctions by Chinese L2 Korean learners. The notion of ‘animacy’ concerns the cognitive question of the extent to which we recognize and express living entities as human/animal-like or non-human/non-animal-like. And our cognitive construal of animacy has been discussed to influence a choice of singular and plural forms of a noun. Korean nouns are classified according to ± animacy and animacy hierarchy, and animate nouns are more likely to be marked by ‘-tul’ than inanimate ones to represent a plural meaning. Considering that Chinese plural marking involving ‘们’ has more restrictions in realization than Korean, this study investigated whether Chinese learners with low and high Korean proficiency levels as well as Korean adults speakers as a control group exhibit different plural marking on animate nouns referring to a person or an animal entity; and inanimate ones referring to a thing or abstract notion. In an elicitation task where participants were instructed to fill in the blank with a noun that matches plural contents of the picture presented, they were allowed to produce either a marked or an unmarked noun to encode plurality. The results showed that the low proficiency group tended to use an unmarked noun regardless of noun animacy, while the high proficiency group, like the control group, attached ‘-tul’ to animate nouns more than inanimate ones. This implies that animacy plays an import role in the choice of singular/plural form in the cognitive learning process universally, however, the performances of L2 learners with low proficiency tend to be influenced by L1 transfer.
Influence of Movement Intention for Bodily Self-Consciousness to a Virtual Body in VR Space
Takumi Igarashi1,*, Masazumi Katayama1
1Human and Artificial Intelligent Systems, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Fukui, Japan
*Correspondence : igarashi@h.his.u-fukui.ac.jp
In this study, we investigated whether the intention to grasp an object contributes to bodily self-consciousness (senses of agency and body ownership) to a virtual hand in a VR space, to evaluate whether the movement intention at the higher level affects bodily self-consciousness. In Experiment 1, to investigate whether the intention of grasping an object is related to bodily self-consciousness, each participant performed a manipulation task of grasping and moving an object and a pantomime task of executing the same action as the manipulation task without presenting the object. After doing each task repeatedly, we measured bodily self-consciousness using a questionnaire. As a result, there was a significant difference between the tasks in each sense of agency and body ownership (p<.05). This indicates that the intention of grasping an object affects bodily self-consciousness. In Experiment 2, to investigate whether the achievement level of the intention of grasping an object affects bodily self-consciousness, each participant performed the manipulation task under each condition of a success condition and a failure condition. However, the virtual hand and the object were occluded by a virtual plate after the trial began. One of the two scenes at the end of the trial was displayed at each trial. In the success condition, the scene of successful results was displayed at the rate of 80% of all trials, and the scene of failed results was displayed in the other trials. The failure condition was the ratio opposite to the success condition. Consequently, there was a significant difference between the conditions in each sense of agency and body ownership (p<.05). These results indicate that the achievement level of the movement intention affects bodily self-consciousness. In conclusion, we indicated that the motor intention and the achievement level contribute to both the senses of agency and body ownership.
Motor Imagery Facilitates Body Consciousness to a Virtual Body and Induces Changes in Body Representation in the Brain
Haruta Makino*, Masazumi Katayama
Human and Artificial Intelligent Systems, Graduate school of Engineering, University of Fukui, Japan
*Correspondence : makino@h.his.u-fukui.ac.jp
In this study, we investigated the relationship between motor imagery and body consciousness because it is possible to facilitate the body consciousness of a virtual body in a video of the same body movement as motor imagery. In Experiment 1, without motor imagery, participants merely observed the video as a virtual hand moved toward one of the discs placed on the left or right. Next, the movement direction of the hand was instructed before presenting the video, and they performed the motor imagery to the instructed movement direction at the same time as the video. Finally, the videos that were congruent and incongruent with the instructions were presented in random order. As a result, in each sense of agency and body ownership, the score in the congruent condition was significantly higher than in the observation condition and the incongruent condition (p<0.05). In Experiment 2, they actively performed a task to grasp a cylinder on the instructed side. Next, by presenting the video of the same movement as the instructed side, they executed the same trial as the above congruent condition. However, some link lengths of the hand were lengthened. Two sets of the trials were performed, each named IT1 and IT2. Consequently, the score of IT2 in each sense was significantly higher than that of IT1 (p<0.05). Moreover, the scores between these performance indexes of the maximum grip aperture and a maximum graspable size that evaluate the changes in the body representation in the brain were significantly different (p<0.05). These results show that motor imagery facilitates the body consciousness of the virtual body even with no somatosensory information from one’s own movements, and furthermore indicate that the body representation changed corresponding to the deformed hand as the result that the sense of body ownership was induced by the motor imagery.
Olympic team rowers and team swimmers show altered functional brain activation during working memory and action inhibition.
Zai-Fu Yao1,2,3,4,*, Ilja G. Sligte5,6, Richard Ridderinkhof5,6
1College of Education, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 2Research Center for Education and Mind Sciences, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 3Department of Kinesiology, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 4Basic Psychology Group, Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 5Brain and Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 6Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
*Correspondence : zfyao@mx.nthu.edu.tw
Background: High-level expertise in team-sports has been found to be associated with superior performance on executive functions (EFs) such as working memory (WM) and action inhibition, and with altered activation of brain areas related to these EFs. In most such studies, athletes were sampled from the domain of dynamic (i.e., open-skill) team sports (e.g., soccer players). Whether static (i.e., closed-skill) team-sports athletes (e.g., rowers and synchronized swimmers) show superior EFs performance and differential EF-related functional brain activation as well remains unknown. Methods: We recruited 14 elite closed-skill athletes, all national champions, and internationally competitive in various rowing disciplines, as well as 14 controls matched on gender, age, and education, and had them perform working memory and action inhibition (stop-signal) tasks during fMRI scanning. Results: Group differences in performance in either task failed to obtain statistical significance, although athletes showed a numerical trend toward higher WM capacity than controls. Importantly, task-related BOLD responses suggested that Olympic closed-skill team athletes show stronger recruitment of brain areas that emphasize relatively stable task demands and weaker engagement of brain areas that emphasize rapidly changing demands imposed by extraneous stimulation. Conclusion: Functional brain imaging data suggest that elite closed-skill athletes may employ different cognitive strategies.
Analyzing Gait of Stroke Patients Using Motion Capture Technology: A Proposal for Foot Position-based Approach
Min-Hyeong Lee1, Ho-Jung Kim1, Semin Ryu1, Chul-Ho Kim2, Jae-Jun Lee3, Dong-Ok Won1,4,*
1Department of Artificial Intelligence Convergence, Hallym University, Korea, 2Department of Neurology, Hallym University Chuncheon Sacred Heart Hospital, Korea, 3Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Hallym University Chuncheon Sacred Heart Hospital, Korea, 4College of Medicine, Hallym University, Korea
*Correspondence : dongok.won@hallym.ac.kr
Stroke is a neurological symptom such as hemiplegia, speech disorder, and consciousness disorder caused by damage to the brain. Many stroke patients survive the early onset of stroke, however, continue to live with sequela. They recover from the sequela using various rehabilitation methods. For effective rehabilitation, continuous monitoring of stroke patients is necessary and there are numerous monitoring systems. In this study, marker-based motion capture technology was used. Many marker-based motion capture studies have utilized a large number of markers. These methods impose a considerable amount of physiological stress on patients and complicated and time-consuming. To achieve a balance between minimizing physiological stress on patients and ensuring high accuracy, we suggest that restricting the number of markers to four. Two markers were attached to each pair of shoes, and two markers were used for calibration. Adult male who without any walking-related disorders were recruited as participants in the experiment. The experiment was conducted to reappear the gait patterns of stroke patients. The gait patterns were divided into three severity levels and categorized based on left and right hemisphere damaged, and the functional ambulation category was referenced. As a result of the experiment, it was found that as the severity increased, the height of the foot in the opposite direction to the damaged brain and the walking speed decreased. These results were similar to those found in previous studies. However, since the study was not conducted with actual stroke patients, there may be limitations in analyzing the gait of actual stroke patients. Although, this study focuses on the fact that the method that we suggest has no problems in collecting and analyzing data. In conclusion, in order to prove the method proposed in this study, it is necessary to conduct research on actual stroke patients in the future.
Sensori-motor Integration and Embedded Cognition
Eunbeen Lee1,*, Nam-in Lee2
1Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, Seoul National University, Korea, 2Department of Philosophy, Seoul National University, Korea
*Correspondence : silberbin@gmail.com
The mind-body problem is an unsolved question in philosophy. The relationship between consciousness in the human mind and the physical body has been under discussion for a long time. In this discussion, the most common positions are dualism and monism (or materialism). While both are quite appropriate method to analyze individual substances or properties, they focus only on the mentality. The positions are not a proper way to understand human beings. Humans, as dynamic organisms, experience in every movement and activity and interact with environment. If we analyze them only in a static condition, we could overlook the most important parts of them. For instance, transhumanism is criticized for focusing solely on the static intellectual beings, not on the active human beings. In this paper, we emphasize that when we understand the relationship between human mind and the physical body, we should deal with the mind and body together. Therefore, we will examine the theory of body, from phenomenology on which body research is based, to embodied cognition in cognitive science. Then, as with the mind-body problem, the sensory integration perspective will be asserted through Hurley’s classical sandwich that criticizes the serial or linear input-output of the relationship between perception and action. Through this approach, we are able to point out the fact that the framework for analysis is geared to measure and observe, but not to capture the numerous potentialities of becoming that go through the process. Furthermore, we suggest that we should be very careful not to regard the becoming as meaningless and unnecessary one, or even as being nothing. We expect that this work might give direction of interdisciplinary body research in cognitive science.
