Causal effect of parental reading on later development of children: Demonstrating a Bayesian approach.

This study examined the relationship between early parental treatment, specifically reading to young children and later cognitive development with a Bayesian perspective. Previous research established a positive link between parental reading to infants and their cognitive development, such as receptive vocabulary, reading comprehension and motivation to read. Using data from the Millennium Cohort Study, this study analysed individuals aged 9 months to 14 years to investigate the effects of early reading to young children on nine cognitive variables.

Bayesian multidimensional scaling for the estimation of a Minkowski exponent.

The Minkowski property of psychological space has long been of interest to researchers. A common strategy has been calculating the stress in multidimensional scaling for many Minkowski exponent values and choosing the one that results in the lowest stress. However, this strategy has an arbitrariness problem-that is, a loss function.

Within-individual discrimination on the Concealed Information Test using dynamic mixture modeling.

Whether an examinee has information about a crime is determined by the Concealed Information Test based on autonomic differences between the crime-related item and other control items. Multivariate quantitative statistical methods have been proposed for this determination. However, these require specific databases of responses, which are problematic for field application.

Role of selective attention in artificial grammar learning.

To investigate the role of selective attention in artificial grammar (AG) learning, participants were presented with "GLOCAL" strings-that is, chains of compound global and local letters. The global and local levels instantiated different grammars. The results of this experiment revealed that participants learned only the grammar for the level to which they attended.

Decline or improvement? Age-related differences in facial expression recognition.

We examined age-related differences in facial expression recognition in association with potentially interfering variables such as general cognitive ability (verbal and visuospatial abilities), face recognition ability, and the experiences of positive and negative emotions. Participants comprised 34 older (aged 62-81 years) and 34 younger (aged 18-25 years) healthy Japanese adults. The results showed not only age-related decline in sadness recognition but also age-related improvement in disgust recognition.

A new discrimination method for the Concealed Information Test using pretest data and within-individual comparisons.

A latent class discrimination method is proposed for analyzing autonomic responses on the concealed information test. Because there are significant individual differences in autonomic responses, individual response patterns are estimated on the pretest. Then an appropriate discriminant formula for the response pattern of each individual is applied to the CIT test results.

Disgust-specific impairment of facial expression recognition in Parkinson's disease.

There is contradictory evidence regarding whether the impairments of the recognition of emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease are specific to certain emotions such as disgust and fear. Generally, neurological case reports on emotion-specific impairments have been suspected of being confounded with the factor of task difficulty. Using a refined assessment method in which the difficulty factors were controlled by means of mixed facial expressions and item response theory, we attempted to clarify whether Parkinson's disease disproportionately impaired the recognition of specific emotions.

[A model of two-dimensional placement of the facial expressions of emotion].

It is a fundamental question whether facial expressions are processed categorically or continuously in the multidimensional space. According to Young, Rowland, Calder, Etcoff, Seth, and Perrett (1997), two-dimensional model predicts that: (i) transitions between expressions should be continuous, and (ii) at least some transitions between expressions should pass through a central neutral region or a region corresponding to a third emotion. We investigated this issue using schematic facial expressions which were used by Yamada (1993).

Measuring individual differences in sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.

The assessment of individual differences in facial expression recognition is normally required to address two major issues: (1) high agreement level (ceiling effect) and (2) differential difficulty levels across emotions. We propose a new assessment method designed to quantify individual differences in the recognition of the six basic emotions, 'sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.' We attempted to address the two major assessment issues by using morphing techniques and item response theory (IRT).

Application of the somatic marker hypothesis to individual differences in decision making.

The somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1991) is a controversial theory asserting that somatic activities implicitly bias human behavior. In this study, we examined the relationship between choice behaviors in the Iowa Gambling Task and patterns of skin conductance responses (SCRs) within a healthy population. Results showed that low SCRs for appraising the monetary outcome of risky decisions were related to persistence in risky choices.