Several studies have shown that our visual system may construct a “summary statistical representation” over groups of visual objects. Although there is a general understanding that human observers can accurately represent sets of a variety of features, many questions on how summary statistics, such as an average, are computed remain unanswered. This study investigated sampling properties of visual information used by human observers to extract two types of summary statistics of item sets, average and variance. We presented three models of (...) ideal observers to extract the summary statistics: a global sampling model without sampling noise, global sampling model with sampling noise, and limited sampling model. We compared the performance of an ideal observer of each model with that of human observers using statistical efficiency analysis. Results suggest that summary statistics of items in a set may be computed without representing individual items, which makes it possible to discard the limited sampling account. Moreover, the extraction of summary statistics may not necessarily require the representation of individual objects with focused attention when the sets of items are larger than 4. (shrink)

dai 1-kan. Nishida Kitarō -- dai 2-kan. Keiken to jikaku -- dai 3-kan. Basho -- dai 4-kan. Zen, kongenteki ningen -- dai 5-kan. Zen no fūkei -- dai 6-kan. Dōtei "Jūgyūzu" o ayumu -- dai 7-kan. Maisutā Ekkuharuto -- dai 8-kan. Hi shinpi shugi -- dai 9-kan. Kokū/Sekai -- dai 10-kan. Jiko no genshōgaku -- dai 11-kan. Shūkyō to wa nani ka.

The emotions that people experience in day-to-day social situations are often mixed emotions. Although autobiographical recall is useful as an emotion induction procedure, it often involves recalling memories associated with a specific discrete emotion. However, real-life emotions occur freely and spontaneously, without such constraints. To understand real-life emotions, the present study examined characteristics of emotions that were elicited by recalling “stressful interpersonal events in daily life” without the targeted evocation of a specific discrete emotion. Assuming generation of mixed and complex (...) emotions, emotional groups with relatively strong correlation of multiple emotions according to surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness were expected. Seventy-two university students participated in the study. In the emotion induction procedure, participants freely recalled memories as per the instructions on a monitor, and then responded silently to a series of questions concerning any one recalled incident. Assessments of emotional states using emotion scales and another item indicated that validated emotional changes had occurred during the task. Inter-correlations between six emotions demonstrated an emotional group consisting of disgust and anger, which frequently occur as negative interpersonal feelings, and that of fear and sadness. This indicated generation of mixed and complex emotions as experienced in social life. Future studies concerning relationships between these emotions and other factors, including neurophysiological responses, may facilitate further understanding about relationships between mental and physiological processes occurring in daily life. (shrink)

Amartya Sen’s work has contributed to shifting our focus from food availability to food access and utilisation, together called ‘nutritional capability’. Existing food insecurity instruments have been informed partially by the capability approach, but remain focused on material deprivation and its economic sub-dimensions. This narrow focus has become problematic, particularly in high-income countries, where material deprivation is largely overcome and food poverty manifests itself differently from that in low-income countries. Food poverty in high-income countries should thus be approached from a (...) ‘food capability’ perspective that fully recognises the multidimensionality of eating lives and the multiple factors that affect their dietary standards. To demonstrate the usefulness of this perspective, the Alkire-Foster method for multidimensional food poverty was utilised to analyse food poverty in Japan. The Alkire-Foster measure has a dual cut-off approach and its adapted method can produce a multidimensional food poverty index by setting reasonable food deprivation and poverty thresholds. The national data used for empirical demonstration was obtained from a web-based questionnaire conducted in Japan, to which 973 participants (aged 20–60 years) responded. The measurement identified a 20.6% food-poor population and inequalities in food capabilities among subgroups. Although economic deprivation was tightly linked to food poverty, the results suggested that gender- and age-based inequalities were larger than socioeconomic status-based ones, which reflected much wider societal problems in Japan than growing economic poverty, such as gender inequality and population ageing. The proposed measurement is effective for monitoring food policy impacts and complementing existing food insecurity assessment tools. The results will be useful for promoting social debate about what the minimal dietary standard should be in high-income societies. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss guidelines for a reward design problem that defines when and what amount of reward should be given to the agent/s, within the context of reinforcement learning approach. We would like to take keepaway soccer as a standard task of the multiagent domain which requires skilled teamwork. The difficulties of designing reward for this task are due to its features as follows: i) since it belongs to the continuing task which has no explicit goal to achieve, (...) it is hard to tell when reward should be given to the agent/s. ii) since it is a multiagent cooperative task, it is hard to decide what is a fair share of reward for each agent's contribution to achieve the goal. Through some experiments, we show that the reward design have a major effect on the agent's behavior, and introduce the successful reward function that makes agents perform keepaway better and more interesting than the conventional one does. Finally, we explore the relationship between `reward design' and `acquired behaviors' from the viewpoint of teamwork. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the self-less self (selbst-lose Selbst) and more particularly this self in its connection with the problem of language. There exists a movement of the self-less self from itself toward itself. This movement also occurs as the liberation from language toward language; language reaches into the core of being self because our understanding of self and of the world is linguistically constituted. Similarly the fundamental conversion - as the occurence of the breakthrough (by means of (...) the I-am-myself) to the truth of the self - is nothing else than an original word event. The self-less, the true self says at this moment: “I am myself by not being myself (Ich bin, indem ich nicht ich bin, ich).” In order to gain a better understanding we now start from the problem of language. (shrink)

In April of 2006, the prominent cultural anthropologist Noriyuki Ueda sat down with the Dalai Lama for a two day conversation. This book is based on that long and lively conversation in Dharamsala.

The objective of this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation for food education in schools. Amartya Sen’s capability approach (CA), an ethical theory concerning the freedom required to achieve one’s well-being, was applied to define the previously unchallenged ethical nature of food education. The analyses were informed by foundational CA concepts, Sen’s own perspectives on ‘food’ and ‘education’, and CA-based education studies. Through these analyses, the fundamental nature of food education was defined as follows: ‘Capability to eat well’ is (...) the freedom to convert commodities (such as food or pocket money) into the ‘functionings to eat well’ that constitute children’s ‘well-eating’ (Definition 1); and the objective of food education as public policy is to expand such capability to eat well (Def. 2). However, if an appropriate pedagogy is not employed, children’s capability can be reduced (Def. 3); therefore, to avoid this, the pedagogy has to enable them to perceive more ‘associations’ (in a Deweyan sense) between related conversion factors (Def. 4), as well as to choose and participate in the educational process (Def. 5). This theory not only elucidated the ethical nature of food education but also expanded the scope of the application of the CA to food issues. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to gain an in-depth understanding of the eating lives of low-income single mothers in Japan. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine low-income single mothers living in the three largest urban areas (Tokyo, Hanshin [Osaka and Kobe] and Nagoya) in Japan. Framed by the capability approach and sociology of food, their dietary norms and practices, as well as underlying factors that impact the norm-practice gap were analysed across nine dimensions: meal frequency, place of eating, meal (...) timing, duration, persons to eat with, procurement method, food quality, meal content and pleasure of eating. These mothers were deprived of various types of capabilities, extending not only from the quantity and nutritional aspects of food, but also to spatial, temporal, qualitative and affective aspects. Aside from financial constraints, eight other factors (time, maternal health, parenting difficulties, children’s tastes, gendered norms, cooking abilities, food aid and local food environment) were identified as influencing their capabilities to eat well. The findings challenge the view that food poverty is the deprivation of economic resources required to ensure a sufficient amount of food. Social interventions that go beyond monetary aid and food provision need to be proposed. (shrink)

A critical examination of Japanese literary and art theories.

The topic of this article is the self-less self (selbst-lose Selbst) and more particularly this self in its connection with the problem of language. There exists a movement of the self-less self from itself toward itself. This movement also occurs as the liberation from language toward language; language reaches into the core of being self because our understanding of self and of the world is linguistically constituted. Similarly the fundamental conversion - as the occurence of the breakthrough (by means of (...) the I-am-myself) to the truth of the self - is nothing else than an original word event. The self-less, the true self says at this moment: “I am myself by not being myself (Ich bin, indem ich nicht ich bin, ich).” In order to gain a better understanding we now start from the problem of language. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen Buddhism” originally appeared as the concluding section of Ueda Shizuteru’s first book, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit: Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus. It was first published in 1965 as an expanded version of Ueda’s doctoral dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Ernst Benz at the University of Marburg. Ueda’s careful analysis not only illuminates important (...) points of affinity between Eckhart and Zen, but also explains why Eckhart’s mysticism cannot be simply interchanged with Zen Buddhism. To allow the reader to read for themselves, I kept all interpretative notes to a minimum. The text is translated from the most recent edition of the German text, published in 2018 by Verlag Karl Alber, and edited by Wolf Burbat. The German pagination is interpolated in bold throughout the text. (shrink)

Romantic love is universally observed in human communities, and the manner in which a person chooses a long-term romantic partner has been a central question in studies on close relationships. Numerous empirical psychological studies have demonstrated that facial attractiveness greatly impacts initial romantic attraction. This close link was further investigated by neuroimaging studies showing that both viewing attractive faces and having romantic thoughts recruit the reward system. However, it remains unclear how our brains integrate perceived facial attractiveness into initial romantic (...) attraction. In addition, it remains unclear how our brains shape a persistent attraction to a particular person through interactions; this persistent attraction is hypothesized to contribute to a long-term relationship. After reviewing related studies, I introduce methodologies that could help address these questions. (shrink)

This book aims at analyzing semantic values of proper names occurring in belief reports. The focus is on the discussion about Frege s puzzle concerning belief reports. The goal is to analyze Frege s puzzle without giving up semantic innocence. To this end, a pragmatic analysis named VarCA analysis is proposed.".

In this study, Knauff and Johnson-Laird's visual impedance hypothesis is applied to the domain of external representations and diagrammatic reasoning. We show that the use of real objects and augmented real objects can control human interpretation and reasoning about conditionals. As participants made inferences, they also moved objects corresponding to premises. Participants who moved real objects made more invalid inferences than those who moved AR objects and those who did not manipulate objects. Our results showed that real objects impeded conditional (...) reasoning, but AR objects did not. These findings are explained by the fact that real objects may over-specify a single state that exists, while AR objects suggest multiple possibilities. (shrink)

A robot that is easy to teach not only has to be able to adapt to humans but also has to be easily adaptable to. In order to develop a robot with mutual adaptation ability, we believe that it will be beneficial to first observe the mutual adaptation behaviors that occur in human–human communication. In this paper, we propose a human–human WOZ (Wizard-of-Oz) experiment setting that can help us to observe and understand how the mutual adaptation procedure occurs between human (...) beings in nonverbal communication. By analyzing the experimental results, we obtained three important findings: alignment-based action, symbol-emergent learning, and environmental learning. (shrink)