Human Science International Course & Human Science Course

  Human beings sleep and wake up about every 24 hours. It is usually said that our clock in our body let us to do. Has anyone seen body clock? No one. This is an actually controversial issue in this research field. In the first part of this presentation, I will briefly review the history of body clock research from a nonlinear dynamical point of view, which is a research area of physics. In later part, I will show the recent findings from biochemistry including my work.

  In order to maintain proper synchronization with the environment, human circadian rhythm is very sensitive to the 24-h light/dark cycle (the earth’s rotation). However, our present society has many dark places at daytime such as underground mall, while there are many bright places at nighttime such as 24h-convenience stores. In the present society, our circadian rhythm is difficult to synchronize with 24h-life rhythm. The desynchronization may cause sleep problems and its related health risk. I’d like to talk about the physiological effects of light on human, and the recommended characteristic of light.

  Visually induced self-motion perception is named vection. Here I introduce what vection is. The charcteristics of vection, and the stimulus attributes for effective vection induction will be explained. In addition, the relationship between vection and other human psychological aspects, i.e. time perception, number perception, and memory will be discussed.

  Physiological anthropology is dealing with human adaptability to environment. Although human beings has biologically adapted to the ancient environment in hunter-gatherer age, the current environment absolutely different from the ancient one is favorably accepted by humans, which would be one of the important issues. What cause the discrepancy between the environment to which we have adapted and the environment in which we choose the easy way with high technology and how we can evaluate the effects of the discrepancy on human responses and how our outcomes are returned to the current society will be discussed.

  The physiological structure of the eye seems inconvenient for visual perception in the light of precise sensing of a scene. For example, on the retina, there are blod vessels and a blind spot. There is a lower density of cones in peripheral retinal areas. Eye movement causes rapid retinal-image motion. Furthermore, eye blinks insert a blank period in continuous visual processing. It is clear that cooperation between eye and brain compensates for such inconvenience. I will summarize these examples and propose some future studies.

  I’d like to show the recent data in my laboratory regarding to the physiological responses induced by pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. In our laboratories, we deliver visual, acoustic, odorous, systemic sensory (tactile, vibrating) stimuli in an attempt to extensively and intensively explore the special features of physiological responses (electroencephalography, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, immune system) produced under such emotional conditions. Said basic research studies will probably spur development of high value-added functional products in bettering human lives in our ever-changing global environments.

  An overview of brain imaging techniques, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG), will be given in combination with research on human perception. In particular, data will be presented on perception and cortical functioning of adults, preschool children, and autistic children, with regard to the auditory modality (e.g., tone perception, speech), the visual modality (perception of static images and motion), or a combination of perceptual modalities (e.g., visuotactile perception).

  Educational process in the classrooms of a school is to transmit knowledge, exchange ideas, and share experiences via speech communication. Poor acoustic environments by noisy and reverberant conditions in the classroom deteriorate speech information. As a result, construction of new knowledge and literacy in a schoolchild may be prevented. In this paper, physical parameters of room acoustics such as noise, reverberation and speech transmission index (STI) are outlined, and recent guidelines of the classroom acoustics are introduced. The poor speech perception in the classroom caused by noise and reverberation affects education of school children, especially persons with hearing problem. Acoustic treatments of the classroom, hearing assistive devices of an audio induction loop, FM and an infrared, sound field amplification system and hearing aids with a directional microphone are mentioned for improving acoustic environment in the classroom.

  Firstly, optimization mechanism of evolutionary computation (EC) and applications of interactive EC (IEC) are explained. Secondly, IEC research directions and our new research direction, "IEC as a tool for human science," is explained.

  Light has various effects such as effects on human circadian rhythm, sleep,endocrine hormone, alertness, and pupillary light reflex. These effects are called “non-visual effects” or “non-image forming effects”, are induced by light signals projecting to the hypothalamus in the brain, not to the visual area. Human physiological functions adapt to the natural light-dark cycle. However, dynamic changes in natural sunlight have a negative effect on mood and circadian rhythm in high-latitude regions in winter. In modern society, it has been reported that artificial light at night has negative effects on human health via non-image forming pathways. In this seminar, I shed light on human adaptation to natural and artificial light environments.

  What kinds of cues are utilized in speech understanding by humans? The robustness of speech perception against variability of speech itself and various distortions in time and frequency domain cannot be explained properly by any sequential template matching, which assumes stabilized patterns to be matched with templates exist if one knows proper amounts of stretching and shrinking in time beforehand, but the assumption is far from realistic one. The approach utilized in this study is entirely different from conventional pattern-matching approach: the research group including the author applied factor analyses on power fluctuations of 20-channel-critical-band-filtered speech in eight languages spoken by both females and males. The results exhibited striking similarity of three factors among these languages, and these factors lead four common frequency bands. The common frequency bands were utilized in synthesizing noise-vocoded speech for perceptual experiments, in order to elucidate some aspects of speech perception.

  Search reaction times (RTs) are slower to target sections of a multi-sectioned display when the ratio between larger to smaller sections is equivalent to 1.61803. Using a visual-search task we sought to establish whether this effect was due to the spatial frequency structure of the displays. We added visual noise to each display matrix which had the statistical effect of convoluting the existing spatial frequency structure with a uniform distribution, and reduced RTs consistent with our expectations.

  Aging and disability lead to decline of physical abilities, which deteriorate their daily life. To solve their inconveniences, we have to develop strategies for preventing the decline of their abilities as well as design for the living environment and products. In this seminar, I will introduce our research findings regarding characteristics of their physical abilities, and discuss preferable human life design for them.

  I will talk the following topics: 1) introduction of reseraches being conducted in our lab. 2) an evaluation of a dichromatic simulation used in Color Universal Design. 3) a critical problem for spreading Color Universal Design. 4) a solution of the problem.