Kazuhiro Ueda

Previous studies demonstrate that people with less professional knowledge can achieve higher performance than those with more professional knowledge in creative activities. However, the factors related to this phenomenon remain unclear. Based on previous discussions in cognitive science, we hypothesised that people with different amounts of professional knowledge have varying attention deployment patterns, leading to different creative performances. To examine our hypothesis, we analysed two datasets collected from a web-based survey and a popular online shopping website, Amazon.com (United States). We found that during information processing, people with less professional knowledge tended to give their divided attention, which positively affected creative performances. Contrarily, people with more professional knowledge tended to give their concentrated attention, which had a negative effect. Our results shed light on the relation between the amount of professional knowledge and attention deployment patterns, thereby enabling a deeper understanding of the factors underlying the different creative performances of people with varying amounts of professional knowledge.

Cooperation (i.e., co-creation) has become the principal way of carrying out creative activities in modern society. In co-creation, different participants can play two completely different roles based on two different behaviours: some participants are the originators who generate initial contents, while others are the revisors who provide revisions or coordination. In this study, we investigated different participants’ roles (i.e., the originator vs. the revisor) in co-creation and how these roles affected the final cooperation-group outcome. By using cooperation networks to represent cooperative relationships among participants, we found that peripheral members (i.e., those in the periphery of the cooperation networks) and core members (i.e., those in the centre of the cooperation networks) played the roles of originators and revisors, respectively, mainly affecting the quantity versus the quality of their creative outcomes. These results were robust across the three different datasets and the three different indicators defining core and peripheral members. Previous studies have considered cooperation behaviours to be homogeneous, ignoring that different participants may play different roles in co-creation. This study discusses patterns of cooperation among participants based on a model in which different roles in co-creation are considered. Thus, this research advances the understanding of how co-creation occurs in networks.

The anchoring effect is a form of cognitive bias in which exposure to some piece of information affects its subsequent numerical estimation. Previous studies have discussed which stimuli, such as numbers or semantic priming stimuli, are most likely to induce anchoring effects. However, it has not been determined whether anchoring effects will occur when a number is presented alone or when the semantic priming stimuli have an equivalent dimension between a target and the stimuli without a number. We conducted five experimental studies (N= 493) using stimuli to induce anchoring effects. We found that anchoring effects did not occur when a number was presented alone or when phrases to induce semantic priming were used without presenting a number. These results indicate that both numerical and semantic priming stimuli must be presented for anchoring effects to occur. Our findings represent a substantial contribution to the literature on anchoring effects by offering insights into how these effects are generated.

Previous studies have shown that people find special meaning in numerical arrays. In this article, we have focused on the features of numerical arrays, repdigits (e.g., “777”), and examined the effect of repdigits on judgments and choices. We formulated the following hypotheses: (1) when people want to assign special meanings to numbers [in the case of purchase or choice of alternatives that contain numbers (e.g., serial numbers)], repdigits will be chosen since people tend to prefer numbers that contain repdigits, and (2) when people think about probabilistic or statistical events involving numerical arrays, they will regard repdigits as a mere set of numerical arrays, and preference for them will disappear. Through five behavioral experiments, we examined these two hypotheses and the results generally supported them. We also discussed the features and psychological processes of repdigits in judgments and choices.

Logically equivalent but different descriptions (i.e., manipulation of verbal expressions) affect decision-making in a phenomenon known as the framing effect. A choice architecture changes decision-makers’ actions, which in turn create different frames, but little is known about whether the frame created by their action can change their judgments. We examined whether self-initiated action induced by a choice architecture changed evaluations. In two experimental studies (N = 271), we found that self-initiated actions whose final goal was completely the same and for which no verbal expressions were manipulated led to different evaluations. In particular, we found that a difference in the placement of rewards, which required participants to behave differently, changed their ratings of satisfaction with the rewards. This study provides evidence that the framing effect can occur without verbal manipulation. This finding advances our understanding of how participants’ actions lead to different evaluations.

Previous studies have shown that people often use heuristics in making inferences and that subjective memory experiences, such as recognition or familiarity of objects, can be valid cues for inferences. So far, many researchers have used the binary choice task in which two objects are presented as alternatives (e.g., “Which city has the larger population, city A or city B?”). However, objects can be presented not only as alternatives but also in a question (e.g., “Which country is city X in, country A or country B?”). In such a situation, people can make inferences based on the relationship between the object in the question and each object given as an alternative. In the present study, we call this type of task a “relationships‐comparison task.” We modeled the three inference strategies that people could apply to solve it (familiarity‐matching [FM; a new heuristic we propose in this study], familiarity heuristic [FH], and knowledge‐based inference [KI]) to examine people's inference processes. Through Studies 1, 2, and 3, we found that (a) people tended to rely on heuristics, and that FM (inferences based on similarity in familiarity between objects) well explained participants' inference patterns; (b) FM could work as an ecologically rational strategy for the relationships–comparison task since it could effectively reflect environmental structures, and that the use of FM could be highly replicable and robust; and (c) people could sometimes use a decision strategy like FM, even in their daily lives (consumer behaviors). The nature of the relationships–comparison task and human cognitive processes is discussed.

Previous studies showed that regular users have become an important source of innovation (called user innovation). Previous studies also suggested that two factors have significant impacts on user innovation: the social network structure of the users and neighbours’ innovation performance (neighbours mean users having interactions with the focal user). However, in these studies, the influence of the two factors were only discussed separately, and it remained unclear whether these two factors interdependently affected a focal user’s innovation. To examine the interplay between the network structure and the neighbours’ innovation performance, we harnessed data sets from “Idea Storm”, which collects data on user network and idea submission. Through panel regression analyses, we found that—within an open-network structure—the higher innovation performance of neighbours has a larger positive impact on the focal user’s innovation ability. Conversely, in an enclosed network structure, neighbours’ higher performance has a larger negative impact on the focal user’s innovation ability. Our findings filled an important gap in understanding the interplay between the network structure and the neighbours’ performance in user innovation. More broadly, these results suggested that the interplay between the neighbours and the network structures merits attention that even goes beyond user innovation.

There is a need within human movement sciences for a markerless motion capture system, which is easy to use and suffciently accurate to evaluate motor performance. This study aims to develop a 3D markerless motion capture technique, using OpenPose with multiple synchronized video cameras, and examine its accuracy in comparison with optical marker-based motion capture. Participants performed three motor tasks (walking, countermovement jumping, and ball throwing), with these movements measured using both marker-based optical motion capture and OpenPose-based markerless motion capture. The differences in corresponding joint positions, estimated from the two different methods throughout the analysis, were presented as a mean absolute error (MAE). The results demonstrated that, qualitatively, 3D pose estimation using markerless motion capture could correctly reproduce the movements of participants. Quantitatively, of all the mean absolute errors calculated, approximately 47% were less than 20 mm and 80% were less than 30 mm. However, 10% were greater than 40 mm. The primary reason for mean absolute errors exceeding 40mm was that OpenPose failed to track the participant’s pose in 2D images owing to failures, such as recognition of an object as a human body segment, or replacing one segment with another depending on the image of each frame. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that, if an algorithm that corrects all apparently wrong tracking can be incorporated into the system, OpenPose-based markerless motion capture can be used for human movement science with an accuracy of 30mm or less.

This study aimed to identify effective presentation methods used for historical self-comparisons of residential water consumption that will lead to the efficient use of water. To compare each household’s current and previous water consumption, illustrations of water droplets were used as feedback every other week for five months, with the number of water droplets indicating an increase or decrease in water consumption. When only using the same blue water droplets, there was no change in water consumption. However, when using yellow and red droplets in cases of increased water use, we observed that water consumption declined. By improving the method of communication, historical self-comparisons of water consumption can realize an efficient use of water at all consumption levels.

Previous studies have shown that when choosing one of two logically equivalent frames (e.g., “half full” or “half empty”), people tend to choose based on a reference point. For example, when the amount of water in a glass with 500 ml capacity was originally 0 ml (or 500 ml), and then increased (or decreased) to 250 ml, people tend to express the amount of water in the glass as “half full” (or “half empty”). In the present study, we examined whether participants explicitly made a frame choice based on the reference point. We conducted four behavioral experiments relating to frame choice tasks. Specifically, participants were presented with a story-based or prime-based reference point and then made a frame choice. Furthermore, participants provided their reasons for the choice. Our findings on frame choices and their reasons can be summarized as follows. First, when participants were presented with a story-based reference point, some of them reported that they made frame choices based on the reference point. Second, when a reference point was presented as a prime, participants’ frame choices were affected by this reference point. However, almost no participants reported that they made frame choices based on the reference point. These results indicate that the effect of reference points on frame choices is robust and that people do not always explicitly make frame choices based on the reference point.