Reward eliminates retrieval-induced forgetting.

Although it is well known that reward enhances learning and memory, how extensively such enhancement occurs remains unclear. To address this question, we examined how reward influences retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) in which the retrieval of a nonpracticed item under the same category as a practiced item is worse than the retrieval of a nonpracticed item outside the category. Subjects were asked to try to encode category-exemplar pairs (e.

Pupil response and the subliminal mere exposure effect.

The subliminal mere exposure effect (SMEE) is the phenomenon wherein people tend to prefer patterns they have repeatedly observed without consciously identifying them. One popular explanation for the SMEE is that perceptual fluency within exposed patterns is misattributed to a feeling of preference for those patterns. Assuming that perceptual fluency is negatively correlated with the amount of mental effort needed to analyze perceptual aspects of incoming stimuli, pupil diameter should associate with SMEE strength since the former is known to reflect mental effort.

The change in perceptual synchrony between auditory and visual speech after exposure to asynchronous speech.

Recent studies have shown that audiovisual synchrony is recalibrated after exposure to asynchronous auditory and visual signals. This temporal recalibration has been shown only under a dual-task situation for speech signals. Here we examined whether the temporal recalibration occurs for audiovisual speech in a single-task situation using an offline adaptation method.

The effects of anxiety on the interpretation of emotion in the face-voice pairs.

Anxious individuals have been shown to interpret others' emotional states negatively. Since most studies have used facial expressions as emotional cues, we examined whether trait anxiety affects the recognition of emotion in a dynamic face and voice that were presented in synchrony. The face and voice cues conveyed either matched (e.

Job role quality and intention to leave current facility and to leave profession of direct care workers in Japanese residential facilities for elderly.

The aim of the present study is to examine job role quality relating to intention to leave current facility and to leave profession among direct care workers in residential facilities for elderly in Japan. Direct care workers completed a paper questionnaire on October 2009. From 746 facilities in three prefectures (Tokyo, Shizuoka, and Yamagata) 6428 direct care workers with complete data were included in the analyses.

Lateral biases and reading direction: a dissociation between aesthetic preference and line bisection.

Perceptual asymmetries for tasks involving aesthetic preference or line bisection can be affected by asymmetrical neurological mechanisms or left/right reading habits. This study investigated the relative contribution of these mechanisms in 100 readers of Japanese and English. Participants made aesthetic judgments between pairs of mirror-reversed pictures showing: (a) static objects, (b) moving objects and (c) landscapes.

I feel your voice. Cultural differences in the multisensory perception of emotion.

Cultural differences in emotion perception have been reported mainly for facial expressions and to a lesser extent for vocal expressions. However, the way in which the perceiver combines auditory and visual cues may itself be subject to cultural variability. Our study investigated cultural differences between Japanese and Dutch participants in the multisensory perception of emotion.

[Presence/absence of original information in the misleading information effect: an investigation using recognition and priming tasks similar to original information presentation].

Several previous studies on the misleading information effect employed priming tasks to examine the presence/absence of original information. Given hyperspecificity of priming, however, it is questionable whether or not their priming tasks were sensitive enough to detect original information because their stimuli were perceptually different from the slides in the study phase. In the priming task of this research, we used slides whose perceptual properties were equivalent to those of the studied ones.