Shoji Itakura

Ritsumeikan University · Research Organization of Open Innovation and Collaboration

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...

Grit is known to be effective for long-term academic and social success. However, few studies have focused on the role of grit in parenting and its effect on the development of grit in children. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of maternal grit on children’s effortful control (EC), which is thought to be a precursor to grit, using pare...

Fear of doctors is a common source of distress among infants; however, the underlying sources of this distress are unknown. To investigate the doctor-infant relationship, the behaviors of 61 healthy infants (176–617 days old) were observed in a simulated examination room. Their behaviors and electrocardiograms were recorded. Two groups of infants w...

The theory of mind (ToM) is not substantially influenced by aging, suggesting the emergence of various compensatory mechanisms. To identify brain regions subserving ToM in older adults, we investigated the associations of individual differences in brain structure with performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), a widely used measur...

BACKGROUND Developmental diversity (DD) challenges traditional disorder classifications that view neurodevelopmental differences as determined by human variations. However, few studies have longitudinally examined DD and the coordinated effects of child and maternal factors on DD. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to reveal how DD arises by l...

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across fi...

Human visual cognition differs profoundly between cultures. A key finding is that visual processing is tuned towards focal elements of a visual scene in Western cultures (US and Europe) and towards the background in Eastern cultures (Asia). While some evidence for cultural differences exists for young children, to date, the ontogenetic origins of c...

Humans feel empathic embarrassment by witnessing others go through embarrassing situations. We examined whether we feel such empathic embarrassment even with robot avatars. Participants observed a human avatar and a robot avatar face a series of embarrassing and non-embarrassing scenarios. We collected data for their empathic embarrassment and the...

According to the Theory of Natural Pedagogy, object-directed emotion may provide different information depending on the context: in a communicative context, the information conveys culturally shared knowledge regarding the emotional valence of an object and is generalizable to other individuals, whereas, in a non-communicative context, information...

Background: In developed countries, the time fathers spend on childcare has increased steadily in recent decades. However, studies on the relationship between paternal care and child outcomes remain scarce. Thus, we examined the association between paternal involvement in childcare and children's developmental outcomes. Methods: We used Japan's...

It is well known that children use sleep aids, such as blankets or soft toys, at bedtime. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding the factors associated with their use and role in addressing sleep problems. This study investigated 96 Japanese children aged 40 to 47 months to examine these associations. We measured children’s stress (thr...

Previous cross‐cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context‐sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the fie...

Children all over the world learn language, yet, the contexts in which they do so varies substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their two-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime acro...

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...

Nature vs. nurture is an enduring theme of studies of the mind. Past studies on American children and adults have revealed a preference for thinking that even fundamental cognitive abilities documented in human infants and non-human species are late-emerging and reliant on learning and nurture. However, little is known about the generalizability of...

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...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties in communication with others, which may derive from limitations in their understanding of pragmatic language. In this study, we used the Conversational Violations Test (CVT) with children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children in order to examine their sensitivity to viol...

Humans, unlike any other species, have adapted to diverse environments across the globe due to cultural knowledge, skills, and practices. In early childhood, parent–child interactions play a pivotal role in cultural learning, but controversies about what constitutes teaching have stymied the systematic assessment of variation and similarities in pa...

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...

This study describes individual differences in children’s anthropomorphic tendencies toward their special objects. It explores factors related to the individual differences, focusing on the effect of motivation for social connection, type of special object (personified objects or not), and parents’ anthropomorphic tendencies. Fifty-five children, a...

Previous studies suggest that people from the Western hemisphere tend to explain others’ behavior based on a person’s traits and dispositions, while participants from non-Western cultural settings more likely refer to situational factors. From a developmental perspective, it has been suggested that culture-specific modes of explaining behavior grad...

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...

Prior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However, little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100 Japanese and German preschool-aged children’s memory monitoring and control in a visual...

Efficient data collection in developmental studies is facing challenges due to the decreased birth rates in many regions, reproducibility problems in psychology research, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we propose a novel platform for online developmental science research, the Baby’s Online Live Database (BOLD), which extends the scope of the acce...

Movement synchrony is an essential feature of rituals and collective displays around the world. Previous studies have shown that synchronous movements increase observers' perceived group entitativity and fighting capacity in agonistic contexts; however, little is known about the developmental roots of synchrony-dominant attributions. In this study,...

Purpose Executive function (EF) has three subsystems: inhibition, updating, and shifting. Of these three, only inhibition is considered to be involved in affective theory of mind (ToM). This study investigated whether inhibition remains the sole driver for affective ToM in the three EF subsystems in older adults as well as in young people without f...

How experience affects the flexibility of facial identity recognition in adulthood is not fully understood. Primatologists are an interesting type of participants investigating facial identity recognition ability and flexibility because they can recognize individual primates based on their appearance, including body and facial features, through int...

Visual processing of the body movements of other animals is important for adaptive animal behaviors. It is widely known that animals can distinguish articulated animal movements even when they are just represented by points of light such that only information about biological motion is retained. However, the extent to which nonhuman great apes comp...

Reciprocal interactions require memories of social exchanges; however, little is known about how we remember social partner actions, especially during childhood when we start forming peer-to-peer relationships. This study examined if the expectation-violation effect, which has been observed in adults’ source memory, exists among 5–6-year-old childr...

This study examined whether three- and five-year-old children and adults changed their perceptions of a robot after a naturalistic interaction with it. We examined whether participants exhibited animism errors (i.e., attributing biological properties to a target in addition to psychological, perceptual, and name properties) or agentic animism (i.e....

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 relationship between humans and robots is increasingly becoming focus of interest for many fields of research. The studies investigating the dynamics underpinning the human–robot interaction have, up to date, mainly analysed adults’ behaviour when interacting with artificial agents. In this study, we present results associated with the human–ro...

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...

Recent technological developments in robotics has driven the design and production of different humanoid robots. Several studies have highlighted that the presence of human-like physical features could lead both adults and children to anthropomorphize the robots. In the present study we aimed to compare the attribution of mental states to two human...

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children’s metacognitive abilities. Moreover, one prominent theo...

Human infants can categorize objects at various category levels (e.g., as a dog, animal, or living thing). It is crucial to understand how infants learn about the relationships between objects. This study investigated whether 4- to 11-month-old infants can categorize modeled objects at superordinate and living/non-living levels. In this experiment,...

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...

Attractiveness is perceived based on both facial physical features and prior experience for adults. Infants also prefer attractive or familiar faces, but it is unclear whether facial physical features and prior experience affect their preference. In this study, we investigated whether infants’ preference for faces was shaped by both facial physical...

In the context of reciprocity, behaving cooperatively only when it enhances one’s reputation is a strategy that brings reputational benefits at minimal cost; however, if other members of society notice an individual employing such a strategy, any accumulated positive reputation may be negated. The present study addresses the development of this soc...

Object category levels comprise a crucial concept in the field of object recognition. Specifically, categorization performance differs according to the category level of the target object. This study involved experiments with two types of stimulus sequences (i.e., forward condition: presenting the target name before the line-drawing stimulus; and r...

Several empirical and theoretical studies have examined the role of robots in child-robot interaction, and they have shown that robotic agents can be perceived as social partners. Nonetheless, studies on moral development in pre-schoolers classically involve a human subject as a violator of moral norms. No studies have ever analysed the situation i...

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,...

Acquisition of walking changes not only infants' locomotion itself but also infants' exploratory behavior and social interaction, such as gaze communication. To understand the ecological context in which gaze communication occurs and how it changes with walking development from the point of view of the spatial arrangement of infants, parents, and o...

A recent controversy in infants' social learning has revolved around whether ostensive cues have an effect beyond simply grabbing infants' attention: natural pedagogy theory vs. attention modulation theory. However, since previous research only focused on gaze-following behaviors, it has failed to determine whether attention-grabbing versus ostensi...

This paper reviews the role of empathy in autism spectrum disorders and psychopathy. Empathy can be subdivided into two categories: cognitive empathy (i.e., the ability to identify the emotions of others) and affective empathy (i.e., the ability to share or match the emotions of the self with those of others). Individuals with autism spectrum disor...

Mental imagery refers to representations and the accompanying experience of sensory information in the absence of appropriate sensory input. Little is known about children’s social imagery, imagery about an agent. It is possible that children’s social imagery may qualitatively differ from that of adults by involving more perceptual characteristics....

Cooperation is fundamental to human society; thus, it may come as little surprise that by their second birthdays, infants are able to perceive when two human agents are working together towards a shared-goal. However, far less is known about whether infants view non-human agents as being capable of cooperative shared-goals. Thirteen-month-old infan...

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 assoc...

It is unknown whether linguistic cues influence preschoolers’ recognition of facial expression when the emotion of the face is incongruent with the linguistic cues and what type of linguistic cue is influential in the modulation of facial expression. In a priming task, we presented 5-year-old children three types of linguistic information conveying...

We investigated whether Japanese adults' beliefs about friendship and morality toward robots differing in appearance (i.e., humanoid, dog-like, and egg-shaped) related to their animism tendencies and empathy. University students responded to questionnaires regarding three animism tendencies (i.e., general animism or a tendency to believe souls or g...

A well-known cross-cultural difference in human cognition is the relative focus on the object versus the background of a visual scene, described as context-sensitivity. In western cultures, people tend to attend to focal objects, while in eastern societies people also take into account elements from the background (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). Köster &...

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...

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...

We are expected to behave appropriately to suit social situations. One form of behavioral control is the selection of a linguistic register that is appropriate to the listener. Register selection errors can sometimes be interpreted as rude behavior and result in having a bad influence on the relationship with the listener and the evaluation by othe...

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...

In the present study, we test the main hypothesis that infants’ understanding of others’ needs translates into helping behavior, when critical motor and social competencies have emerged, early in the second year. We assessed the understanding of others’ needs in an eye‐tracking paradigm and the helping behavior of 10‐ (n = 41) and 16‐month‐olds (n...

Music preferences are important indicators of individual differences during adulthood (Rentflow & Gosling, 2006; Hunter et al., 2011). However, when these indicators become reliable in development is not clear. Since humans show early sensitivity to music, especially to its emotional aspect (Trehub, 2003), individual differences in music preference...