著者

Chihiro ISHIKAWA Takashi SHIGA

出版者

日本感性工学会

雑誌

Kansei Engineering International Journal (ISSN:18840841)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, no.3, pp.109-114, 2012 (Released:2012-07-02)

参考文献数

29

被引用文献数

2

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Tactile stimulation is an important factor in mother-infant interactions. Many studies on both human and animals have shown that tactile stimulation during the neonatal period has various beneficial effects in the subsequent growth of the body and brain. In particular, massage is often applied to preterm human babies as “touch care”, because tactile stimulation together with kinesthetic stimulation increases body weight, which is accompanied by behavioral development and the changes of endocrine and neural conditions. Among them, the elevation of insulin-like growth factor-1, catecholamine, and vagus nerve activity may underlie the body weight gain. Apart from the body weight gain, tactile stimulation has various effects on the nervous system and endocrine system. For example, it has been reported that tactile stimulation on human and animal babies activates parasympathetic nervous systems, while suppresses the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenalcortical (HPA) axis, which may be related to the reduction of emotionality, anxiety-like behavior, and pain sensitivity. In addition, animal experiments have shown that tactile stimulation improves learning and memory. Facilitation of the neuronal activity and the morphological changes including the hippocampal synapse may underlie the improvement of the learning and memory. In conclusion, it has been strongly suggested that tactile stimulation in early life has beneficial effects on body, brain structure and function, which are maintained throughout life.

著者

Kenji YOKOI Tsuyoshi TOMITA Shinya SAIDA

出版者

日本感性工学会

雑誌

Kansei Engineering International Journal (ISSN:18840841)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, no.3, pp.101-107, 2012 (Released:2012-07-02)

参考文献数

12

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Although many studies have examined eye movements in reading, it is unclear what factors separate fast readers from slow readers. Some studies suggest that effective visual field size should be a dominant factor. However, a direct link between reading speed and effective visual field is under controversial. To clarify this issue, we investigated eye movements in reading in conjunction with speed reading training. Four participants (approx. 600 letters per minute in Japanese) improved thier reading speed through training for half an hour per day for 30 days. Reading performance of Japanese editorial articles was recorded every five days of training by the gaze-contingent window method. In three participants, effective visual field size did not increase in the same manner as reading speed which increased up to 1000 lpm. Instead, we found that in those three participants mean saccadic length became longer due to the reduction of short and unsystematic saccades. On the contrary, one participant showed high correlation between effective visual field and reading speed. Our results suggest that not only the size of the effective visual field but also efficiency of comprehension at a single gaze may be important factors for reading speed. The qualitative discrepancy among individuals suggests the existence of multiple strategies for fast reading.

著者

Chie Muraki ASANO Akira ASANO Liang LI Takako FUJIMOTO

出版者

日本感性工学会

雑誌

Kansei Engineering International Journal (ISSN:18840841)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.10, no.1, pp.11-18, 2010 (Released:2011-09-16)

参考文献数

25

被引用文献数

2 3

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Since the surface texture of materials often affects human visual impressions as much as or more than the design, shape, or color properties, texture characteristics have been studied as features of object identification. We have been investigating the effect of texture on visual impression and objective identification using black fabrics that do not exhibit any effects of color. Our studies showed that visual impressions of texture correspond to complex micro-components and global structures of image features of those textures. Our results also showed that some important elements influence human visual impressions and identification of textures. Because of a variety of fibrous structures, it is not easy to provide a systematic analysis of clothing materials. Nevertheless, developing the method and collecting data on these elements and their effects using these image features will be important. To make this research applicable for wider use, we have been studying precisely what it is about an arbitrary texture that influences human visual impressions and sensibility. As a new step, in this paper, a texture is altered and transformed using the parameter estimation method of texture based on mathematical morphology, which is often used for extracting image components that are useful for representation and description. A texture is decomposed into a primitive and grain arrangement which correspond to local and global characteristics, respectively. Different textures are created by modifying the primitive and the arrangement to investigate the effects of modifications of local and global features. The relationship between the parameters and visual impressions of the modified textures were evaluated. This study shows that influence of both local and global structures of the texture along with their combinations and mutual interactions are important for identification of human visual impression.