Red Backgrounds Enhance Dominance in Human Faces and Shapes.

Red color signals dominance in both animals and humans. This study investigated whether a red background color influences the perception of dominance in human faces and geometric shapes. The facial stimuli consisted of computer-generated faces, quantitatively morphed into nine levels of dominance, ranging from less dominant to more dominant.

The self can be associated with novel faces of in-group and out-group members: A cross-cultural study.

The self can be associated with arbitrary images, such as geometric figures or unknown faces. By adopting a cross-cultural perspective, we explored in two experiments whether the self can be associated with faces of unknown people from different ethnic groups. In Experiment 1, Asian Japanese participants completed a perceptual matching task, associating Asian or White faces with themselves.

Different judgment frameworks for moral compliance and moral violation.

In recent decades, the field of moral psychology has focused on moral judgments based on some moral foundations/categories (e.g., harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity).

Cross-cultural comparison of beauty judgments in visual art using machine learning analysis of art attribute predictors among Japanese and German speakers.

In empirical art research, understanding how viewers judge visual artworks as beautiful is often explored through the study of attributes-specific inherent characteristics or artwork features such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness. These attributes form the basis for subjective evaluations, including the judgment of beauty. Building on this conceptual framework, our study examines the beauty judgments of 54 Western artworks made by native Japanese and German speakers, utilizing an extreme randomized trees model-a data-driven machine learning approach-to investigate cross-cultural differences in evaluation behavior.

Cultural transmission and religious belief: An extended replication of Gervais and Najle (2015) using data from the International Social Survey Programme.

Beliefs in supernatural agents or religious beliefs are pervasive, yet there are individual differences in such beliefs. Although various factors have been proposed as relevant, recent research has increasingly emphasized the importance of cultural learning, showing that enthusiastic religious behavior (credibility enhancing displays; CREDs) from parents predicts increased religious beliefs among their children. In addition to this kin-biased learning, Gervais and Najle (2015) analyzed data from the World Values Survey to demonstrate that the number of adults who show religious CREDs is also an important predictor of people's beliefs, indicating that individuals develop their religious beliefs through conformist learning.

Comparing experience- and description-based economic preferences across 11 countries.

Recent evidence indicates that reward value encoding in humans is highly context dependent, leading to suboptimal decisions in some cases, but whether this computational constraint on valuation is a shared feature of human cognition remains unknown. Here we studied the behaviour of n = 561 individuals from 11 countries of markedly different socioeconomic and cultural makeup. Our findings show that context sensitivity was present in all 11 countries.

The role of perceptual processing in the oddball effect revealed by the Thatcher illusion.

When a novel stimulus (oddball) appears after repeated presentation of an identical stimulus, the oddball is perceived to last longer than the repeated stimuli, a phenomenon known as the oddball effect. We investigated whether the perceptual or physical differences between the repeated and oddball stimuli are more important for the oddball effect. To manipulate the perceptual difference while keeping their physical visual features constant, we used the Thatcher illusion, in which an inversion of a face hinders recognition of distortion in its facial features.

Fear in action: Fear conditioning and alleviation through body movements.

Fear memories enhance survival especially when the memories guide defensive movements to minimize harm. Accordingly, fear memories and body movements have tight relationships in animals: Fear memory acquisition results in adapting reactive defense movements, while training active defense movements reduces fear memory. However, evidence in humans is scarce because their movements are typically suppressed in experiments.

Face adaptation induces duration distortion of subsequent face stimuli in a face category-specific manner.

Studies have shown that duration perception depends on several visual processes. However, the stages of visual processes that contribute to duration perception remain unclear. This study examined the effects of categorical differences in face adaptation on perceived duration.

Electrocardiographic activity depends on the relative position between intimate persons.

Interpersonal space (IPS) refers to the area surrounding the body in which we engage in social interactions while maintaining our comfort. Numerous previous studies have reported the psychological and physiological changes associated with the proximity of two people engaged in face-to-face interaction. Currently, there is limited knowledge about how the relative position between two socially intimate individuals affects their psychological and physiological states.

Systematic bias in representation of reaction time distribution.

A correct perception of one's own abilities is essential for making appropriate decisions. A well-known bias in probability perception is that rare events are overestimated. Here, we examined whether such a bias also exists for action outcomes using a simple reaction task.

Color-taste correspondence tested by the Stroop task.

People consistently associate colors with tastes (e.g., pink-sweet, yellow-sour).

Automatic imitation in children: Age-related change and comparison to adults.

Automatic imitation, in which one person's movement is affected by the observation of another person's movements, has been widely reported. However, it remains unclear how automatic imitation changes over a wide age range, particularly during childhood. In this study, we examined the differences in the tendency for automatic imitation between adults and children and the cross-sectional age-related changes in children aged 5-12 years, using a stimulus-response conflict paradigm.

Autism Detection in Children using Common Spatial Patterns of MEG Signals.

Autism exhibits a wide range of developmental disabilities and is associated with aberrant anatomical and functional neural patterns. To detect autism in young children (4-7 years) in an automatic and non-invasive fashion, we have recorded magnetoencephalogram (MEG) signals from 30 autistic and 30 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. We have used a machine learning classification framework with common spatial pattern (CSP)-based logarithmic band power (LBP) features.

Visual images of disgusting creatures facilitated attentional orienting and delayed attentional disengagement.

Numerous studies have suggested that threatening stimuli induce a spatial attention bias; however, only a few studies have investigated spatial attention biases for disgusting stimuli. Moreover, past studies generally reported that the spatial attention bias to disgusting images is not robustly in normal individuals. We hypothesized that this was due to the unfamiliar of the images, so we prepared the creature's images that were clearly categorized as disgusting and examined the effects of disgusting images on spatial attention bias.

Red biases sex categorization of human bodies.

Color is associated with gender information (e.g., red-female).

Crossmodal correspondences between visual features and tastes in preschoolers: an exploratory study.

Introduction: Adults possess a natural inclination to associate sensory cues derived from distinct modalities, such as the pairing of sweet with pink. However, studies exploring crossmodal correspondences in children, particularly in the sensory pairing of visual features and tastes, are scant, leaving unanswered questions regarding the developmental trajectory of crossmodal correspondences. The present study investigates whether Japanese preschool children demonstrate specific biases in shape-color, shape-taste, and color-taste associations.

Children attribute higher social status to people who have extraordinary capabilities.

Throughout history, individuals believed to have extraordinary capabilities were generally highly ranked in their communities; this suggests a universal "extraordinary-dominant expectation" in human minds, which may play a key role in religious thought, even in modern societies. This study shows that 5-6-year-old children, who begin to understand real-world causalities regarding how the body and mind of human beings work, predict that individuals who exhibit extraordinary capabilities have higher social status in interactions with individuals who exhibit ordinary capabilities. In Experiment 1, we showed children two individuals achieving goals using either humanly possible or impossible methods, the latter involving simple forms of violation of intuitive psychology (knowing without seeing), physics (flying), or biology (fire breathing).

An automatic red-female association tested by the Stroop task.

Colors have been reported to be associated with genders (e.g., reddish color-females).

The evasive truth: do mere exposures at the subliminal and supraliminal levels drive the illusory truth effect?

The subjective truth of a statement is boosted by mere exposure to itself or a part of itself. This phenomenon is referred to as the . We examined whether subliminal pre-exposure to the statement topic would increase its subjective truth.

People with higher autistic traits show stronger binding for color-shape associations.

Non-synesthetes exhibit a tendency to associate specific shapes with particular colors (i.e., circle-red, triangle-yellow, and square-blue).

Red background color biases gender categorization of human faces.

Color carries gender information (e.g., red-female).

Outcome context-dependence is not WEIRD: Comparing reinforcement- and description-based economic preferences worldwide.

Recent evidence indicates that reward value encoding in humans is highly context-dependent, leading to suboptimal decisions in some cases. But whether this computational constraint on valuation is a shared feature of human cognition remains unknown. To address this question, we studied the behavior of individuals from across 11 countries of markedly different socioeconomic and cultural makeup using an experimental approach that reliably captures context effects in reinforcement learning.