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(1) Increased right temporo-parietal and middle frontal gyral activity with more associates, but fewer unique items during study in four paired recognition tasks
Steven Phillips (Neuroscience Research Institute, AIST)
Kazuhisa Niki (Neuroscience Research Institute, AIST)

Working memory is affected by items stored and the associations between them. However, separating these factors has been difficult, because increased items usually accompanies increased associations/relations. In this series of experiments, these two factors are varied independently. Subjects were given lists of study pairs and asked to make a recognition judgement. The number of unique items and maximum associations in three list conditions were: (1) AB, CD: four/one; (2) AB, CD, EF: six/one; and (3) AB, AD, CB: four/two, respectively. Japanese letters were used in Experiments 1 (ideograms) and 2 (phonograms); digits in Experiment 3; and shapes generated from Fourier Descriptors in Experiment 4. Across all materials, right temporo-parietal and middle frontal gyral activity was found with increased number of associates, but not items. Because this effect was common to all domains, and right inferior parietal lobule has been implicated in bilateral shifts of spatial attention, we suggest that encoding of overlapping pairs may be enhanced by repeatedly attending to component items. We also discuss domain-specific effects as possible indicators of chunking (i.e. interpreting pairs as single items) to reduce task difficulty.


(2) Hippocampus's role in retrieval of task-related knowledge and memory: Flashing to the things you are looking for and solidifying them into long-term memory
Jing Luo (Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Kazuhisa Niki (Neuroscience Research Institute, AIST)

A series of fMRI researches was conducted to investigate the role of hippocampus in higher cognitive function, we proved the activity of hippocampus increased when a), the availability of task-related knowledge (TRK) was increased; b), subjects suddenly got the correct answers of Japanese riddles; and c), subjects processed the semantic information they were looking for. Based on this, it was proposed that, through participating in retrieval of TRK and consolidation of episodic memory, hippocampus enabled the organism to keep the information that owned great survival values in mind for future usage.


(3) The left hippocampal region was specifically involved in the retrieval of facial identity. An event-related fMRI study
Tetsuya Iidaka (Nagoya University, Graduate School of Environmental Studies)
Tomohisa Okada (NIPS, Dept of Cerebral Research)
Norihiro Sadato (NIPS, Dept of Cerebral Research)
Yoshiharu Yonekura (Fukui Medical University, BIRC)

We investigated neural responses to retrieval of facial identity and emotion using an event-related fMRI and healthy subjects. Under the identity condition the subject performed recognition test for neutral face, and under the emotional condition they retrieved expression of target face. Under the identity condition, activation was found in the bilateral hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, whereas under the emotional condition the activation was right lateralized. The left hippocampus responded more greatly to the target faces than to the distracter faces under the identity condition, suggesting that this region was specifically involved in the mnemonic process of facial identity.


(4) Cross-modal Comparison of Encoding and Retrieval of Recognition Memory and Source Memory: An fMRI study
Hikari　KINJO (School of Social Information Studies Otsuma Women's University)
Izuru Nose (Department of Human Studies, Bunkyo Women's University, Japan)
Masato Taira (Department of Physiology, Nihon University, School of Medicine Tokyo, Japan)

The object of this functional MRI study was to identify cerebral activations involved in the general processes during encoding and retrieval of recognition and source memory. Although previous studies showed a various cerebral regions (e.g., right PFC and/or left PFC) associated with recognition and source memory, it remains to be demonstrated that the activations were not due to stimulus specific effects. This study compared the cortical activations between two stimulus conditions (Kanji words and line-drawings), in terms of encoding and retrieval during recognition and source memory tasks. Results and theoretical implications will be discussed.


(5)

Withdrawn


(6) Impairment of story memory organization in patients with schizophrenia
Mie Matsui (Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan)
Tomiki Sumiyoshi (Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan)
Kanade Kato(Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan)
Sawako Sumiyoshi (Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan)
Yuko Kikura (Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan)
Masayoshi Kurachi (Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan)

Memory impairment is one of the most consistent findings among the neuropsychological deficits reported in patients with schizophrenia. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between psychopathology and the organization of story memory in patients with schizophrenia. The organization structure of memory was evaluated with the Logical Memory stories of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised. The results confirm previous findings that memory organization of story is impaired in patients with schizophrenia, and suggest that the memory organization deficits are related to the disorganized thought and behavior.


(7) Self-referential mental activity: An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study
Takashi Horiuchi (Tokai Women's College, Japan)
Michio Nomura (Nagoya University, Japan)
Tetsuya Iidaka (Nagoya University, Japan)
Norihiro Sadato (National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Japan)
Tomohisa Okada (National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Japan)
Yoshiharu Yonekura (Fukui Medical University, Biomedical Imaging Research Center, Japan)

The self-referent encoding facilitates the recall performance. The purpose of present study is to investigate the difference between self-referent encoding and other encodings by event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. In the learning phase, six right-handed subjects judged trait adjectives under three separate fMRI scan conditions: (a) self-reference, (b) semantic, (c) physical. After the learning phase, they were given the surprise free recall task, and self-reference effect was confirmed. The analysis of fMRI data showed that the self-referent encoding yielded specific activations in the thalamus.


(8) The role of semantic information in Japanese sentence comprehension
Miki Uetsuki (Dept. of Psychology, Grad. School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo)
Kenji Itoh (Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo)
Akira Iwanami (Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo)
Ichiro Koshida (Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo Engineering University)

In order to examine the role of semantic information in Japanese sentence comprehension, we presented the garden-path sentences with the different two semantic biases, and investigated Event-Related Potential (ERP) components elicited by these sentences. The result shows that the ERP components were no significant difference between two semantic biases. Parser builds the syntactic structure without reference to semantic information in the garden-path theory, on the other hand parser builds the syntactic structure using not only syntactic information but also semantic information in the constraint-based model. Therefore this result suggests that the garden-path theory is more suitable for Japanese sentence comprehension model than the constraint-based model.


(9) The interaction of on-line inferences: The effects of predictive inferences on bridging inferences
Ryuta Iseki (University of Tsukuba, Japan)

This study investigated whether bridging inferences are affected by predictive inferences or not, using meaningfulness-decision task, in which participants decided as fast and as accurate as possible whether the target sentence is meaningful or not. In experiment 1, prediction-consistent bridging inferences were compared with prediction-inconsistent bridging inferences. The former had greater priming effect than the latter. In Experiment 2, predictive inferences were compared with prediction-consistent bridging inferences. The latter had greater priming effect than the former. Thus, prediction-consistent bridging inferences were more activated than predictive inferences and prediction-inconsistent bridging inferences, perhaps because of additional activations from predictive inferences.


(10) Word processing in two languages sharing the same Chinese character: The case of more and less fluent bilinguals in Chinese and Japanese
Naoko Kotake (Graduate School of Hiroshima University, Japan)
Chie Kawamura (Graduate School of Hiroshima University, Japan)
Norie Nakashima (Graduate School of Hiroshima University, Japan)
Suh Hyerin (Graduate School of Hiroshima University, Japan)
Yoshiko Habuchi (Graduate School of Hiroshima University, Japan)
Norio Matsumi (Graduate School of Hiroshima University, Japan)

Researches on second language acquisition suggest a progression from reliance on word form to reliance on meaning with increasing proficiency in the second language. An experiment was carried out to investigate whether the progression was observed in Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. More and less fluent bilinguals in Chinese and Japanese performed a translation recognition task in which they decided whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. In the experiment the words were not correct translation equivalents, but related by lexical form (e.g., (public) instead of (company)) or meaning (e.g., (sweeping) instead of (keeping tidy)). The results showed that both bilinguals suffer from semantically related words in the experiment.


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