Learning to like it: Aesthetic perception of bodies,movements and choreographic structure

Appreciating human movement can be a powerful aesthetic experience. We have used apparent biological motion to investigate the aesthetic effects of three levels of movement representation: body postures, movement transitions and choreographic structure. Symmetrical (ABCDCBA) and asymmetrical (ABCDBCA) sequences of apparent movement were created from static postures, and were presented in an artificial grammar learning paradigm. Additionally, “good” continuation of apparent movements was manipulated by changing the number of movement path reversals within a sequence. In an initial exposure phase, one group of participants saw only symmetrical sequences, while another group saw only asymmetrical sequences. In a subsequent test phase, both groups rated all sequences on an aesthetic evaluation scale. We found that posture, movement, and choreographic structure all influenced aesthetic ratings. Separate ratings for the static body postures presented individually showed that both groups preferred a posture that maximized spatial symmetry. Ratings for the experimental sequences showed that both groups gave higher ratings to symmetrical sequences with “good” continuation and lower ratings to sequences with many path reversals. Further, participants who had been initially familiarized with asymmetrical sequences showed increased liking for asymmetrical sequences, suggesting a structural mere exposure effect. Aesthetic preferences thus depend on body postures, apparent movement continuation and choreographic structure. We propose a hierarchical model of aesthetic perception of human movement with distinct processing levels for body postures, movements and choreographic structure.     

Is behavioral pro-sociality game-specific? Pro-social preference and expectations of pro-sociality

We observed the behaviors of the same people across five games – two prisoner’s dilemma games, a trust game (in which the subject took on the role of both truster and trustee), a dictator game, and a faith game – any pair of which was separated by an interval of several months to reduce potential carry-over effects, and found strong consistency in behaviors among these games. We also found consistency between the expectations of other players’ behaviors and the player’s own behavior across games. We further found that the consistent behavioral pro-sociality observed across different games was related to the general measures of pro-social value orientation and perceiving the game situations. These findings suggest that individual and cultural differences in game behaviors can reflect both the ways in which people perceive game situations and their general social preferences.     

Preemptive strike: An experimental study of fear-based aggression

The mere presence of a potential threat of attack was found to be sufficient to lead a significant proportion of participants to engage in preemptive attacks toward potential threats; this response occurred even without an incentive for either party to attack the other. We developed a new experimental game—the preemptive strike game (PSG)—to demonstrate this tendency for defensive aggression. We also found that the rate at which participants attacked an individual representing a potential threat was not influenced by their minimal group membership; participants were no less likely to preemptively attack a member of their own minimal group and no more likely to use aggression against members of another minimal group. These findings indicate a need to further examine the role that fear-based defensive aggression, rather than anger-based spiteful aggression, plays in inter-individual and inter-group conflict.     

Working Memory Training Improves Dual-Task Performance on Motor Tasks

The authors investigated whether working memory training improves motor-motor dual-task performance consisted of upper and lower limb tasks. The upper limb task was a simple reaction task and the lower limb task was an isometric knee extension task. 45 participants (age = 21.8 ± 1.6 years) were classified into a working memory training group (WM-TRG), dual-task training group, or control group. The training duration was 2 weeks (15 min, 4 times/week). Our results indicated that working memory capacity increased significantly only in the WM-TRG. Dual-task performance improved in the WM-TRG and dual-task training group. Our study provides the novel insight that working memory training improves dual-task performance without specific training on the target motor task.     

Cooperative strain accommodation over grains in martensitic transformation from Fe-Ni nanocrystalline austenite

This paper reports an investigation of martensitic transformation behaviour from austenite with various grain sizes ranging from 290 nm to 34 μm in an Fe–Ni alloy fabricated by electrodeposition and subsequent heat treatment. We confirmed that martensite morphology changed from lath to thin plate with decreasing the austenite grain size. Crystallographic orientation analysis revealed that the variants of thin plate martensite formed in the austenite with relatively coarse grains achieved self-accommodation of the transformation strain inside one austenite grain. In contrast, the transformation strain accompanying martensitic transformation from the ultrafine-grained or nanocrystalline austenite was not accommodated by the martensite variants formed in one austenite grain but accommodated cooperatively by those formed in the several adjacent austenite grains.     

Amount of Priming in the Difference of Mental Transformation

The Psychological Record - We examined in detail effects of priming in 2 mental rotation strategies: spinning (rotating in a picture plane) and flipping (rotating in depth around a horizontal axis)...     

Modesty in self‐presentation: A comparison between the USA and Japan

Japanese participants in Study 1 exhibited a self‐effacing tendency when no reason for their self‐evaluation was provided. However, they exhibited a self‐enhancing tendency when they were offered a monetary reward for the correct evaluation. In Study 2, Americans, especially American men, exhibited a self‐enhancing tendency whereas Japanese exhibited a self‐effacing tendency when no reason for making the evaluation was presented. This cultural difference disappeared when participants were provided with a monetary reward for correctly evaluating their performance level. These results support the view that the modesty observed in self‐evaluation among Japanese participants is a ‘default strategy’ to avoid offending others.     

Exchanges of group-based favours: Ingroup bias in the prisoner's dilemma game with minimal groups in Japan and New Zealand

Japanese ( N  = 48) and New Zealander ( N  = 55) participants were first assigned to one of two minimal groups, and then played a prisoner's dilemma game twice with an ingroup member and twice with an outgroup member. In one of the two games they played with an ingroup (or outgroup) member, participants and their partner knew one another's group memberships (mutual-knowledge condition). In the unilateral-knowledge condition, only the participants knew the group membership of their partner, but the partner did not know the group membership of the participant. Ingroup bias in cooperation emerged only in the mutual-knowledge condition in both countries; in the unilateral-knowledge condition no ingroup bias emerged. Mediational analyses found that, in accord with predictions, cooperation in the mutual-knowledge condition is mediated by expectation of the partner's cooperation. Ingroup bias in the mutual-knowledge condition emerged only among those who identified with the ingroup. Results provide support for a group heuristics account of ingroup favouritism in the minimal group. According to this account, participants who face minimal groups activate an ecologically adaptive heuristic of unilaterally cooperating with members of the same group, expecting indirect repayment from others in the same group.     

The difference between flipping strategy and spinning strategy in mental rotation

Murray (1997 Memory & Cognition 25 96-105) showed that, when an inverted object was mentally rotated to upright, the reaction time (RT) of flipping strategy (rotating in depth about the horizontal axis) was shorter than that of spinning strategy (rotating in the picture plane). We hypothesised the absence of representation at the intermediate position between the inverted and the upright representations in the flipping strategy, and investigated this hypothesis by a priming paradigm that included prime and probe tasks within one trial. In the prime task, participants were asked to mentally rotate an inverted object to upright. In the probe task, they were asked to judge whether two objects simultaneously presented were the same or different. The flipping strategy in the prime task did not prime the probe task, whereas the spinning strategy did. The present results suggest that there is no intermediate representation in the flipping strategy: the difference in RT between the flipping strategy and the spinning strategy may be attributed to whether there is an intermediate representation or not, which could explain why depth rotation is faster.