Yohtaro Takano

An unsupported common view: Comparing Japan and the U.S. on individualism/collectivism

It has long been believed that the Japanese are more collectivistic than the Americans. To assess the validity of this common view, we reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared these two nations on individualism/collectivism. Surprisingly, 14 studies did not support the common view; the only study that supported it turned out to bear little relevance to the ordinary definition of individualism/collectivism. An examination of the supportive evidence of the common view disclosed that this view had been formed on an unexpectedly flimsy ground. It further turned out that the wide acceptance of the common view may have been the result of the fundamental attribution error, which may have led to an underestimation of situational factors in interpreting the past obviously collectivistic behavior of the Japanese.

A Temporary Decline of Thinking Ability During Foreign Language Processing

It was predicted that the use of a foreign language should cause a temporary decline of thinking ability because the heavier processing load imposed by a foreign language than by a native language should produce stronger interference with thinking to be performed concurrently. A divided-attention experiment with Japanese-English and English-Japanese bilinguals confirmed this prediction: performance in a thinking task (i.e., calculation) declined when a concurrent linguistic task (i.e., question-answering) had to be performed in their respective foreign languages. This decline is distinguished from foreign language processing difficulty per se because the thinking task involved no foreign language use. The decline was also observed in another divided-attention experiment employing a different type of thinking task, that is, spatial reasoning problems adopted from intelligence tests.

Mirror reversal: Empirical tests of competing accounts

In a mirror, left and right are said to look reversed. Surprisingly, this very familiar phenomenon, mirror reversal, has still no agreed-upon account to date. This study compared a variety of accounts in the light of empirical data. In Experiment 1, 102 students judged whether the mirror image of a person or a character looked reversed or not in 15 settings and also judged the directional relation between its components. In Experiment 2, 52 students made the reversal judgements in 13 settings. It was found for the first time that a substantial proportion of people denied the left–right mirror reversal of a person, whereas virtually all of them did recognize that of a character. This discrepancy strongly suggested that these two kinds of mirror reversal are produced by different processes, respectively. A number of findings including this discrepancy clearly contradicted two accounts that are currently active: the one based on the priority of the up–down and front–back axes over the left–right axis, and the one based on the physical rotation of an object. All the findings were consistent with an account that considered mirror reversal a complex of three different phenomena produced by three different processes, respectively.

Risk aversion in information seeking

The information gain model argues that participants select alternatives with a larger expected value of information gain. The present study investigated risk aversion in information seeking to examine whether the expected value always determines information-seeking behaviour. For this investigation, we used a scale method selection task in which participants were required to select one of two scales for weighing coins in order to find an underweight coin. Two experiments showed that participants more frequently selected the alternative that provided information gain without risk, although its expected information gain was smaller. This finding indicates the presence of risk aversion in information seeking, suggesting that information-seeking behaviour is affected by risk associated with obtaining information gain.

Functional segregation of segmental features, pitch‐accents, and nondistinctive suprasegmental features in working memory

Japanese has pitch‐accent which contribute to lexical distinctiveness just as segmental features. A dual‐task experiment was conducted to examine the independence among segmental features, pitch‐accents, and nondistinctive suprasegmental features in working memory. Japanese speakers of Tokyo dialect participated in the experiment. The primary task was a working memory task which required the retention of both segmental and suprasegmental features of nonsense words. The suprasegmental features were either regular pitch‐accent of Tokyo dialect or pseudopitch changes that do not exist in a Japanese accent pattern. The secondary task was silent mouthing of irrelevant verbal material either without putative pitch change, with pitch accent, or with pseudopitch change, that was performed during the retention period of the primary task. The results revealed selective interference according to distinctivity of pitch patterns in native speakers of Tokyo dialect, suggesting functional segregation between distinctive...

Absence of perceptual segmentation in image generation by normals

We used kanji characters (Chinese ideographic characters) and hiragana characters (Japanese phonographic characters) in the transfer-appropriate processing paradigm to examine whether or not people without brain damage conduct perceptual segmentation while generating a visual mental image. Ninety-six participants were divided into three study conditions: (a) seeing hiragana characters and generating a mental image of the corresponding kanji characters; (b) seeing the kanji characters; and (c) seeing the hiragana characters without generating the image of the kanji characters. Generating an image of a kanji character did not transfer at test to the decision as to whether the visually presented kanji character was vertically segmented or not, whereas it did transfer to a semantic decision as to whether the kanji character had a concrete or abstract meaning. Seeing a kanji character transferred to both decisions. Seeing hiragana characters without generating an image of the kanji characters transferred to neither decision. These results suggest that perceptual segmentation is not routinely conducted by normals in the process of image generation.