Yohtaro TAKANO |
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Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo 113-0033
Japan
Phone & Fax: +81-3-5841-3860
E-mail: takano@l.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Last Update: 06 / 18 / 2003
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| Academic Degrees |
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| 1978 | M.A. University of Tokyo |
| 1985 | Ph.D. Cornell University (Fulbright Scholarship Grantee) |
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| Affiliations |
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| 1985-86 | University of Virginia |
| 1987-90 | Waseda University |
| 1990- | University of Tokyo |
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| Research Interests |
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My research interests cover everything related to human cognition from visual cognition, mental imagery, memory, language and thinking, social cognition, to the cognitive basis of science.
In earlier studies, I made efforts to solve relatively well defined problems: i.e., "Why was mental rotation observed in some experiments but not in others?"; "Why left and right look reversed in mirrors?"; "Why do we have difficulty in thinking while struggling with a foreign language?"
Recently, I have been increasingly interested in the nature of human being, especially when it is seen from cultural and evolutionary viewpoints. It seems to me that both cultural psychology and evolutionary psychology consider human mind too much fixed, underestimating its flexibility based on the high information processing capacity.
I have been suffering from multiple diseases for more than fifteen years since I was awarded Ph.D. I have heard that one of my diseases disabled a prominent American researcher for studying visual perception. These diseases forced me to suspend or give up a number of research projects. At their culmination, I had to attend four hospitals and used to read books in their waiting rooms not to stop all the projects. Fortunately, however, I have resumed some of the suspended projects and started new ones because the disaster is now almost over. I would like to see what I could do for the time left in my life.
- Reference Published in English:
- Takano, Y. (1999)
- How does an advisor influence a student?: A case study.
In E. Winograd, R. Fivush, & W. Hirst (Eds.), Ecological approaches to
cognition: Essays in honor of Ulric Neisser. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum. Pp. 335-356.
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| Thinking |
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Foreign Language Side Effect
When we are struggling with an unskilled foreign language, we suffer not only from difficulty in language processing but also from difficulty in thinking. In other words, our intellectual ability is lowered in the midst of foreign language use. This is the foreign language side effect.
I found this phenomenon on the basis of my own experience in the U.S. I also found that my own feeling of lowered thinking ability could be reasonably explained within theoretical frameworks of attention. To verify the presence of the foreign language side effect, I conducted dual-task experiments, in which native speakers of Japanese and those of English were asked to perform a verbal task and a thinking task at the same time. The verbal task was given either in Japanese or in English. The thinking task involved no language at all.
The results of the thinking task showed that performance was much better when the verbal task was given in the native language than when it was given in the foreign language, whether the native language was Japanese or English. This difference between the native and foreign languages cannot be attributed to well-known difficulty in linguistic processing of foreign language because no foreign language was used in the thinking task. Thus, this difference unambiguously demonstrated the presence of the foreign language side effect (Takano & Noda, 1993).
The assumed process of producing the foreign language side effect predicted that the side effect would be larger when a foreign language was more dissimilar to a native language. I conducted two dual-task experiments essentially identical to the above ones: one comparing native speakers of Japanese and those of German with English as a common foreign language, and the other comparing native speakers of English and those of Korean with Japanese as a common foreign language. The results of the thinking task showed that those native speakers whose first language was more dissimilar to the common foreign language (i.e., Japanese speakers and English speakers, respectively) suffered from larger side effect (Takano & Noda, 1995).
Recently, I have resumed this line of research to investigate whether the side effect is present in those settings that are similar to daily situations in which foreign language is used.
Although the foreign language side effect has important social implications in today's world of growing cross-linguistic contact, English speaking psychologists show no interest in this phenomenon probably because they can use English everywhere in the world and thus have little first-hand experience of suffering from foreign language.
- References Published in English:
- Takano, Y. & Noda, A. (1993)
- A temporary decline of thinking ability during
foreign language processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 24, 445-462.
- Takano, Y. & Noda, A. (1995)
- Interlanguage dissimilarity enhances the decline
of thinking ability during foreign language processing. Language
Learning, 45, 657-681.
[Note: The foreign language side effect is called the foreign language effect in these articles.]
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
In "The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West" (1981) and its following article (1984), Dr. Alfred H. Bloom claimed that, due to alleged deficits in Chinese and Japanese languages, native speakers of Chinese and Japanese have lower ability in abstract theoretical thinking than native speakers of English. He conducted a series of experiments, in which he compared Americans to either Chinese or Japanese in multiple-choice problems of reasoning, and found that the Americans consistently revealed better performance.
I conducted methodological analyses of those experiments and found that all of them except one were uninterpretable because they lacked indispensable control conditions. Furthermore, I found that the only experiment that had an appropriate control condition suffered from a procedural flaw.
To investigate how the flaw was related to the difference in performance between Chinese and Americans, I replicated the experiment with Japanese and Americans. An accidental finding in the Japanese sample enabled me to identify the true reason of Dr. Bloomfs difference: due to the procedural flaw, he confounded the difference in familiarity with mathematical functions with the difference in language. In the following experiment, I demonstrated that both American and Japanese science students showed exactly the same pattern of results as shown by Dr. Bloomfs Chinese students, whereas both American and Japanese humanity students showed exactly the same pattern of results as shown by Dr. Bloomfs American students.
The difference in performance found by Dr. Bloom cannot be attributed to the difference in native language because the same difference was present in both American and Japanese samples, respectively.
- Reference Published in English:
- Takano, Y. (1989)
- Methodological problems in cross-cultural studies of
linguistic relativity. Cognition, 31, 141-162.
Reasoning
I was interested in Dr. Cosmides's (1989) version of evolutionary psychology that higher cognitive processes are directly determined by heredity. I conducted an experiment with the Wason selection task to see if her findings with a reversed rule really support her claim that cost-benefit relationship was indispensable for the thematic effect to occur, and found that the effect could be obtained in the absence of cost-benefit relationship if the reversed rule was made understandable as a stipulation of obligation.
A theoretical analysis of available empirical evidence led me to conclude that Dr. Cosmides's claim of innate reasoning programs had no empirical basis at least for the present, though the evolutionary viewpoint would surely benefit understanding human mind.
I conducted a debate with Japanese proponents of evolutionary psychology in a Japanese journal concerning my findings and analysis of empirical evidence.
[Note: This line of research was published only in Japanese.]
Scientific Methodology
I had been interested in philosophical epistemology and philosophy of science before I started my career in psychology. This interest led me to study epistemological basis of science and experimental methodology.
I found that the concept of extraneous variable is extremely important to disentangle many arguments about various methodological issues in science. I classify extraneous variables into two categories: a generating variable which causes the same effect that is caused by an independent variable, and a canceling variable which cancels out that effect. These two types of extraneous variables are indispensable to understand many issues: i.e., the fallacy of falsificationism, the question whether external validity can be dismissed in some cases or not, and so on.
[Note: This line of research was published only in Japanese.]
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| Visual Cognition |
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Mirror Reversal
Why do left and right look reversed in a plane mirror?
This question has been discussed for more than two thousand years since Plato. Nevertheless, surprisingly, there is still no agreed-upon account for this well-known phenomenon.
I examined this mirror-reversal problem and found that every account left some phenomena unexplained. I have also found that the reason why the mirror-reversal problem is so difficult to solve is an a priori assumption that it is a single phenomenon produced by a single principle. In actuality, mirror-reversal is a complex of three different phenomena produced by combinations of three different principles.
In 1998, I proposed a multi-process theory of mirror-reversal and demonstrated that it was able to explain all the phenomena related to mirror-reversal within a unified theoretical framework.
Dr. Corballis (2000) and Dr. Tabata and Dr. Okuda (2000) criticized this theory and proposed their own account of mirror-reversal. Their account predicts that all the mirror-reversals are left-right reversals because they assume that the reason of mirror-reversal is that the left-right direction is determined so as to fit previously determined the up-down and front-back directions, the latter of which is optically reversed by a mirror. In actuality, however, some kinds of mirror images look up-down reversed, which cannot be explained by their theory.
Their account also predicts that all mirror images should look left-right reversed because their explanatory principle is assumed to work on any object. In actuality, however, some kinds of mirror images do not look reversed in any direction, which is also unable to explain for their theory.
Recently, I have obtained empirical data, which unambiguously attest that mirror-reversal is not a single phenomenon produced by a single principle.
- Reference Published in English:
- Takano, Y. (1998)
- Why does a mirror image look left-right reversed?: A
hypothesis of multiple processes. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5,
37-55.
Mental Rotation
I attempted to solve a problem why mental rotation (i.e., a monotonically increasing angle-RT function) was observed in many experiments but not in others. I found that this problem could not be solved within a theoretical framework of mental imagery and that it has to be examined from a viewpoint of form perception. I also found that the presence and absence of mental rotation could be perfectly explained if I assumed four types of information resulting from the combination of the orientation-free vs. orientation-bound distinction and the elementary vs. conjunctive distinction for information to be encoded from perceived forms. Mental rotation and visual search experiments confirmed that the human visual system actually encodes and utilizes these four types of information.
I now believe that these four types of information are available at a level lower than the level at which orientation-invariant structural descriptions (e.g., geons) are formed. I also believe that those four types of information are consulted when necessary information is not represented in upper level descriptions.
- References Published in English:
- Takano, Y. (1989)
- Perception of rotated forms: A theory of information types.
Cognitive Psychology, 21, 1-59.
- Takano, Y. (1993)
- Recognition of forms rotated in depth: A test of the
information type theory. Japanese Psychological Research, 35,
204-214.
- Takano, Y. & Okubo, M. (2002)
- Mental rotation. In Lynn Nadel (Ed.),
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Macmillan.
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| Social Cognition |
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Common sense in popular Japanology tells us that the Japanese are collectivistic, whereas the Americans are individualistic. This common sense was established by an American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, and has been repeatedly presented in hundreds of Japanology books. It has been exerting strong influence on how the Japanese are viewed and on political decisions by the U.S. government in the midst of the U.S.-Japan trade conflict in 80s, for example.
I had been exposed to many Japanology books before I went to the U.S. While I stayed there for five years, however, what struck me was strong similarity between Americans and Japanese concerning individualism and collectivism. Although I experienced many cultural differences, they appeared only superficial ones. Thus, I came to suspect the reality of the above common sense.
With respect to individualism/collectivism, fortunately, empirical international comparisons were in fashion in 80s. We found 17 questionnaire and laboratory studies that directly compared Japanese and Americans on individualism/collectivism. Contrary to the common sense, surprisingly, 5 out of 17 showed that Japanese were more individualistic than Americans, and 11 found no statistically significant difference. The only study that confirmed the common sense was the one conducted by Dr. Hofstede (1980) with IBM employees all over the world, which triggered the later numerous international comparisons on individualism/collectivism. I found that his individualism factor was based on misinterpretation of factor analysis outcomes.
Why was the common sense established and widely accepted if it is not true? Historical and psychological analyses led me to believe that correspondence bias was primarily responsible. The obviously collectivistic behavior of the Japanese for a century can be explained in terms of historical situations that they faced. However, correspondence bias led many observers to assume collectivistic national character for the Japanese, while underestimating the power of the historical situation.
Our study directly contradicted Markus & Kitayama's (1991) view, which heavily relied on popular Japanology. Thus, Dr. Kitayama criticized our article and I showed that his arguments lacked empirical foundation in an on-journal debate.
- Reference Published in English:
- Takano, Y. & Osaka, E. (1999)
- An unsupported common view: Comparing
Japan and the U.S. on individualism/collectivism. Asian Journal of
Social Psychology, 2, 311-341
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| Memory |
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My first published study was concerned with organization in free recall. I have been conducting empirical studies related to various aspects of human memory and knowledge representation together with my graduate students.
- References Published in English:
- Takano, Y. (1978)
- A dissimilarity analysis of organization in multi-trial cued
recall. Japanese Psychological Research, 1978, 20, 148-153.
- Okubo, M. & Takano, Y. (2001)
- Absence of perceptual segmentation in image
generation by normals. Japanese Psychological Research, 43,
121-129.
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