Yukio Maehara

Nagasaki University · Faculty of Education

Joint cognition refers to the mental systems that support group performance when carrying out a shared, or jointly owned task. We focused here on understanding the social configurations that underpin key phenomena in joint cognition; in particular, whether individual cognition in task-sharing environments is mostly shaped by social factors or not....

In everyday life, we need to temporally maintain and manipulate various pieces of information in our mind to achieve social and interpersonal goals. Such a temporal memory system that supports goal-directed behavior is called working memory. This article reviews how working memory functions in social contexts from both a psychological and a neurosc...

Generating random number sequences is a popular psychological task often used to measure executive functioning. We explore random generation under ?joint cognition? instructions; pairs of participants take turns to compile a shared response sequence. Across three studies, we point to six key findings from this novel format. First, there are both co...

Infant emotional expressions, such as distress cries, evoke maternal physiological reactions. Most of which involve accelerated sympathetic nervous activity. Comparatively little is known about effects of positive infant expressions, such as happy smiles, on maternal physiological responses. This study investigated how physiological and psychologic...

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about the mental states of others. An increasing number of studies have revealed that working memory (WM) plays an important role in ToM. The present study applied WM loads to adults during a ToM task in order to investigate the impact on mental‐state reasoning performance. The task required part...

While many studies in the theory of mind (ToM) literature have investigated how we understand others' mental states, few have explored the mechanism by which we reflect on our own mental states. This study examined how adults reflect on their own and others' mental states within the same ToM task. To do so, we modified the Smarties task, one of the...

This research explored the effects of social interaction training with a collaborative puzzle task on children of foreign nationals with ADHD in Japan. The collaborative puzzle task was designed to minimize the need to use language and to require cooperation with another person. The task involved the executive function that is considered to control...

Although an increasing number of studies on adults have indicated that working memory (WM) contributes to the ability to understand the mental states of others (i.e., theory of mind), the detailed mechanism by which WM contributes to successful reasoning has not previously been revealed. This study shows that WM modulates the degree of attribution...

Recent studies using working memory (WM) span tests have reported that processing activities negatively affected memory performance on the one hand and storage activities adversely affected processing efficiency on the other hand. We examined this processing-storage relationship in two WM span tests that required participants to maintain spatial or...

In working memory (WM) span tests, participants maintain memory items while performing processing tasks. In this study, we examined the impact of task processing requirements on memory-storage activities, looking at the stimulus order effect and the impact of storage requirements on processing activities, testing the processing time effect in WM sp...