Mitsuhiko Ishikawa

• Doctor of Psychology
• Assistant Professor at Hitotsubashi University

Developmental studies have adopted preferential-looking paradigms to investigate infant interest in emotional face stimuli. However, because of the attention-grabbing nature of threatening stimuli, research has reported inconsistent results regarding infants’ fixation on happy and angry faces. A recent value-based framework of social looking behavi...

From infancy, humans use gaze cues from others to learn about their surrounding environment. It is known that gaze cues facilitate the cognitive processing of targets in both infants and adults, but what developmental changes occur during childhood? This study investigated the impact of gaze cueing on incidental learning in children aged 7–10 years...

This study investigated the differences between human and robot gaze in influencing preference formation, and examined the role of Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities in this process. Human eye gaze is one of the most important sources of information for social interaction and research has demonstrated its effectiveness in influencing people's preferenc...

Learning new information from others, called social learning, is one of the most fundamental types of learning from infancy. Developmental studies show that infants likely engage in social learning situations selectively and that social learning facilitates infant information processing. In this paper, we summarize how social learning functions sup...

Throughout the history of psychophysiology, measures of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) have contributed to understanding psychological states and cognitive processing. Due to recent advances in brain imaging techniques, brain mapping of cognitive functions has been clarified. However, ANS measurements still have advantages in psychological rese...

Infants adaptively modulate their social behaviours, such as gaze-following, to social context. We propose that such modulations are based on infants’ social decision-making, to achieve the most valuable outcome. We propose an ‘action value calculator model’, which formulates the cognitive mechanisms underlying, and the development of, the decision...

Several studies have shown that infants anticipate human goal-directed actions, but not robot's ones. However, the studies focusing on the robot goal-directed actions have mainly analyzed the effect of mechanical arms on infant's attention. To date, the prediction of goal-directed actions in infants has not yet been studied when the agent is a huma...

Infants engage in gaze interaction from the early stage of life. Emerging studies suggest that infants may expect social reward of shared attention before looking to the same object with another person. However, it was unknown about the neural responses during the anticipation of social rewards before shared attention in infants. We tested infants'...

Gaze following (GF) is fundamental to central aspects of human sociocognitive development, such as acquiring language and cultural learning. Studies have shown that infant GF is not a simple reflexive orientation to an adult's eye movement. By contrast, infants adaptively modulate GF behaviour depending on the social context. However, arguably, the...

Perceiving direct gaze facilitates social cognition and behaviour. We hypothesized that direct gaze modulates decision-making, particularly calculations of action values. To test our hypothesis, we used the reinforcement learning paradigm in situations with or without direct gaze. Forty adults were recruited and participated in pupil size measureme...

Gaze following is fundamental to human sociocognitive development, such as language and cultural learning. Previous studies have revealed that infant gaze following is not a reflexive orienting to adult’s eye movement. Instead, infants adaptively modulate gaze following behaviour depending on social contexts. However, the neurophysiological mechani...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Humans adjust behaviour in the presence of others in a phenomenon called social influence, which can be categorized into social facilitation (promotional effects) and social loafing (inhibitory effects). The study examined whether the productivity level of the partner in individual and collaborative tasks produced a social influence on children's t...

Other's gaze direction triggers a reflexive shift of attention known as the gaze cueing effect. Fearful facial expressions are further reported to enhance the gaze cueing effect, but it remains unclear whether this facilitative effect is specific to gaze cues or the result of more general increase in attentional resources resulting from affective a...

The emergence of cultural differences in face scanning is thought to be shaped by social experience. However, previous studies mainly investigated eye movements of adults and little is known about early development. The current study recorded eye movements of British and Japanese infants (aged 10 and 16 months) and adults, who were presented with s...

Several studies have shown that the human gaze, but not the robot gaze, has significant effects on infant social cognition and facilitate social engagement. The present study investigates early understanding of the referential nature of gaze by comparing-through the eye-tracking technique-infants' response to human and robot's gaze. Data were acqui...

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...

Many studies have explored factors which influence gaze-following behavior of young infants. However, the results of empirical studies were inconsistent, and the mechanism underlying the contextual modulation of gaze following remains unclear. In order to provide valuable insight into the mechanisms underlying gaze following, we conducted computati...

Recent studies have revealed significant cultural modulations on face scanning strategies, thereby challenging the notion of universality in face perception. Current findings are based on screen-based paradigms, which offer high degrees of experimental control, but lack critical characteristics common to social interactions (e.g., social presence,...

Many developmental studies have examined the effects of joint attention. However, it has been difficult to compare effects of initiating joint attention and responding to joint attention in infants. Here, we compared the effects of initiating joint attention and responding joint attention on object information processing, object preference, and fac...

According to the natural pedagogy theory, infant gaze following is based on an understanding of the communicative intent of specific ostensive cues. However, it has remained unclear how eye contact affects this understanding and why it induces gaze following behaviour. In this study, we examined infant arousal in different gaze following contexts a...

Eye gaze is an important signal in social interactions, and it plays an important role to understand what others looking in joint attention (JA) situations. JA has been examined in situations involving two people gazing at objects; however, ecologically, infants observe not only faces that gaze at objects but also those that gaze at other people. H...

All looking time data used for analysis.

The reasons that people with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have social difficulties have been a source of debate. One possibility is the idea of context blindness, which stipulates that the lack of spontaneous use of contextual information may be the core deficit of ASD. Here, we examined how autistic traits and the use of context influence soci...

Limited use of contextual information has been suggested as a way of understanding cognition in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it has also been argued that individuals with ASD may have difficulties inferring others’ mental states. Here, we examined how individuals with different levels of autistic traits respond to contextual...

Eye gaze is one of the most important signals of others’ mental states, and the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) has been proposed as the neural basis of mind-reading. Both eye gaze processing and MNS activation are apparently facilitated by familiarity. We examined how the familiarity of actors affects the eye gaze process during observation of goal-dir...

The sense of fairness has been observed in early infancy. Because many studies of fairness in adults have used economic games such as the Ultimatum Game, it has been difficult to compare fairness between adults and infants. Further, recent studies have suggested that social information about actors who behave fairly or unfairly may influence the ju...

Individual data of ERPs in the test phase. (XLSX)