Relationship Between Shape Perception by Touch and Eye Movement : A Further Study

Two experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between eye movement and perception of an object\u27s shape by touch. In Experiment 1, subjects\u27 eye movements were recorded during the exploration of object by touch. In Experiment 2, recognition of the shape of objects by touch was compared when eye movements were suppressed and when natural eye movements were allowed. Analysis shows that there is a specific pattern of eye movement in each subject during tactile exploration and these eye movements affect the perception of shape by touch

Mother-Infant Interaction of Chimpanzees During the Presentation of Unfamiliar Objects : Evidence for Social Referencing in Chimpanzees

Captive mother-infant chimpanzee pairs were observed in order to investigate the interaction between mother chimpanzees and infant chimpanzees during the presentation of unfamiliar objects. It was found that the infant chimpanzees\u27 responses to the objects were affected by the attention their mothers paid to the objects. It is argued that these data imply social referencing in infant chimpanzees that is closely related to that of human infants

Developmental correspondence between action prediction and motor ability in early infancy.

乳児期初期における他者理解のメカニズムを解明. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2011-06-08How do infants understand the goals of others' actions? It has been proposed that action-understanding results from a mechanism whereby an observed action is mapped onto the observer's own motor representation of that action. However, direct evidence of the matching process in early infancy is difficult to find. Here we show the developmental correspondence between action prediction and motor ability by comparing gazing and grasping responses to interesting objects in 4- to 10-month-old infants and adults. The onset of infants' ability to predict the goal of others' action was found to be synchronized with the onset of their own ability to perform that action. Moreover, there was correspondence relationship between action-prediction ability and motor ability of same action. Our findings indicate that the ability to predict others' action goals requires a corresponding motor ability, providing ontogenetic evidence for a direct matching process by a mirror neuron system

Shape Perception by Active Touch and Passive Touch : The Effect of a Long Retention Interval-Pilot Study

The performance of recognition of shape in active touch and passive touch is an exploratory investigation using delays between acquisition and recognition tests. The results suggested that the type of touching effected the performance of recognition

Autoshaping in Japanese Monkeys (Macaca Fuscata)

Three Japanese monkeys were exposed to autoshaping and omission procedures. The Japanese momkeys seemed to be more sensitive to response-reinforcer contingency than to stimulus-reinforcer contingency. These results were compared with pigeons and squirrel monkeys in the previous reports

Cross-Modal Matching Memory in Young Children : An Exploratory Study with a Long Retention Interval

Fifty-two young children (aged 4 years to 6 years, 4 months) were tested with cross-modal matching and within-modal matching of shapes with two delay conditions. Children were given either visual (V) or tactual (T) acquisition training and then tested for visual recognition (V-V, T-V) or tactual recognition (T-T, V-T) with two retention intervals (0-delay or 1-week-delay). T-V was remembered more easily than V-T with 0-delay, whereas V-T was easier with a 1-week-delay

Implicit social associations for geometric-shape agents more strongly influenced by visual form than by explicitly identified social actions

Studies of infants' and adults' social cognition frequently use geometric-shape agents such as coloured squares and circles, but the influence of agent visual-form on social cognition has been little investigated. Here, although adults gave accurate explicit descriptions of interactions between geometric-shape aggressors and victims, implicit association tests for dominance and valence did not detect tendencies to encode the shapes’ social attributes on an implicit level. With regard to valence, the lack of any systematic implicit associations precludes conclusive interpretations. With regard to dominance, participants implicitly associated a yellow square as more dominant than a blue circle, even when the true relationship was the reverse of this and was correctly explicitly described by participants. Therefore, although explicit dominance judgements were strongly influenced by observed behaviour, implicit dominance associations were more clearly influenced by preconceived associations between visual form and social characteristics. This study represents a cautionary tale for those conducting experiments using geometric-shape agents

Development of a classifier to screen for severe sleep disorders in children

This study aimed to develop an automatic classifier for the identification of severe sleep disorders that require immediate intervention in children. Our study assessed 7,008 children (age: 0–83 months) in Japan, whose parents and nursery teachers recorded their 14-day sleep patterns. Sleep quality was assessed by pediatricians and scored as 1 (no severe sleep disorder) or 0 (severe sleep disorder). Discriminant analysis was performed for each age group using sleep quality (0 or 1) as the dependent variable and variables in the 14-day sleep log as independent variables. A stepwise method was used to select the independent variables to build the best model. The accuracy of the discriminant analysis for the age groups ranged from 71.3 to 97.3%. In summary, we developed an automatic classifier with sufficient application value to screen for severe sleep disorders in children. In the future, this classifier can be used to rapidly determine the presence or absence of severe sleep disorders in children based on their 14-day sleep logs, thus allowing immediate intervention

Eye tracking in an everyday environment reveals the interpersonal distance that affords infant-parent gaze communication

親子の視線交渉が対人距離によって調節されることを解明 --親視点から探る、乳児と親の視線のやりとり--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2019-07-24.The unique morphology of human eyes enables gaze communication at various ranges of interpersonal distance. Although gaze communication contributes to infants’ social development, little is known about how infant-parent distance affects infants’ visual experience in daily gaze communication. The present study conducted longitudinal observations of infant-parent face-to-face interactions in the home environment as 5 infants aged from 10 to 15.5 months. Using head-mounted eye trackers worn by parents, we evaluated infants’ daily visual experience of 3138 eye contact scenes recorded from the infants’ second-person perspective. The results of a hierarchical Bayesian statistical analysis suggest that certain levels of interpersonal distance afforded smooth interaction with eye contact. Eye contacts were not likely to be exchanged when the infant and parent were too close or too far apart. The number of continuing eye contacts showed an inverse U-shaped pattern with interpersonal distance, regardless of whether the eye contact was initiated by the infant or the parent. However, the interpersonal distance was larger when the infant initiated the eye contact than when the parent initiated it, suggesting that interpersonal distance affects the infant’s and parent’s social look differently. Overall, the present study indicates that interpersonal distance modulates infant-parent gaze communication