Response boosts serial dependence in the numerosity estimation task.

Perceptions of current stimuli are sometimes biased toward or away from past perceptions. This phenomenon is called serial dependence. However, the strength of the effect of past responses on serial dependence has not been fully elucidated.

Serial dependence in estimates of the monetary value of coins.

Perceptions of current stimuli are sometimes biased toward or away from past perceptions. This phenomenon is called serial dependence. However, it remains unclear whether serial dependence originates from lower-order perceptual processing, higher-order perceptual processing or cognitive processing.

Hand constraint reduces brain activity and affects the speed of verbal responses on semantic tasks.

According to the theory of embodied cognition, semantic processing is closely coupled with body movements. For example, constraining hand movements inhibits memory for objects that can be manipulated with the hands. However, it has not been confirmed whether body constraint reduces brain activity related to semantics.

Idiosyncratic spatial representations of the days of the week in individuals without synesthesia.

People with spatial sequence synesthesia have clear and stable mental images of spatial arrays of numbers, days of the week, and months. The shapes of the arrays vary by individual. We conducted an experiment to estimate the shapes of spatial arrays in people without synesthesia.

www.kanjidatabase.com: a new interactive online database for psychological and linguistic research on Japanese kanji and their compound words.

Most experimental research making use of the Japanese language has involved the 1945 officially standardized kanji (Japanese logographic characters) in the Jōyō kanji list (originally announced by the Japanese government in 1981). However, this list was extensively modified in 2010: five kanji were removed and 196 kanji were added; the latest revision of the list now has a total of 2136 kanji. Using an up-to-date corpus consisting of 11 years' worth of articles printed in the Mainichi Newspaper (2000-2010), we have constructed two novel databases that can be used in psychological research using the Japanese language: (1) a database containing a wide variety of properties on the latest 2136 Jōyō kanji, and (2) a novel database containing 27,950 two-kanji compound words (or jukugo).

Serial order learning of subliminal visual stimuli: evidence of multistage learning.

It is widely known that statistical learning of visual symbol sequences occurs implicitly (Kim et al., 2009). In this study, we examined whether people can learn the serial order of visual symbols when they cannot detect them.

A self-organizing learning account of number-form synaesthesia.

Some people automatically and involuntarily "see" mental images of numbers in spatial arrays when they think of numbers. This phenomenon, called number forms, shares three key characteristics with the other types of synaesthesia, within-individual consistency, between-individual variety, and mixture of regularity and randomness. A theoretical framework called SOLA (self-organizing learning account of number forms) is proposed, which explains the generation process of number forms and the origin of those three characteristics.

Japanese mental syllabary and effects of mora, syllable, bi-mora and word frequencies on Japanese speech production.

The present study investigated the existence of a Japanese mental syllabary and units stored therein for speech production. Experiment 1 compared naming latencies between high and low initial mora frequencies using CVCVCV nonwords, indicating that nonwords with a high initial mora frequency were named faster than those with a low frequency initial mora. Experiments 2 and 3 clarified the possibility of CV light and CVN/CVR heavy syllables as being units implicated in speech production.

New figures for a Web-accessible database of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji, fourth edition.

On the basis of calculations using the latest lexical database produced by Amano and Kondo (2000), the fourth edition of a Web-accessible database of characteristics of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji was produced by including the mathematical concepts of entropy, redundancy, and symmetry and by replacing selected indexes found in previous editions (Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, & Kawakami, 2002). The kanji database in the fourth edition introduces seven new figures for kanji characteristics: (1) printed frequency, (2) lexical productivity, (3) accumulative lexical productivity, (4) symmetry for lexical productivity, (5) entropy, (6) redundancy, and (7) numbers of meanings for On-readings and Kun-readings. The file of the fourth edition of the kanji database may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive, http://www.

Frequency of occurrence for units of phonemes, morae, and syllables appearing in a lexical corpus of a Japanese newspaper.

On the basis of the lexical corpus created by Amano and Kondo (2000), using the Asahi newspaper, the present study provides frequencies of occurrence for units of Japanese phonemes, morae, and syllables. Among the five vowels, /a/ (23.42%), /i/ (21.