Published papers

© 2019, Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature. Dr. Furukawa had a sharp view in pinpointing that the crucial issue in skill science lies in discovering missing parts, that it is an act of abductive thinking, and that logic programming can be best used to encourage people, who intend to learn embodied skills, to think and feel more than without it. In the wake of the grief that our communities lost Dr. Furukawa, discussions on implications that his great contributions to AI, cognitive science and skill science have brought to us are a necessary “must” for all that keep doing researches for people’s well-being.

© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). This paper discusses the effects of multiple viewpoint videos for metacognition of experiences. We present a system for recording multiple users' collaborative experiences by wearable and environmental sensors, and another system for viewing multiple viewpoint videos automatically identified and extracted to associate to individual users. We designed an experiment to compare the metacognition of one's own experience between those based on memory and those supported by video viewing. The experimental results show that metacognitive descriptions related to one's own mind, such as feelings and preferences, are possible regardless whether a person is viewing videos, but such episodic descriptions as the content of someone's utterance and what s/he felt associated with it are strongly promoted by video viewing. We conducted another experiment where the same participants did identical metacognitive description tasks about half a year after the previous experiment. Through the experiments, we found the first-person view video is mostly used for confirming the episodic facts immediately after the experience, whereas after half a year, even one's own experience is often felt like the experiences of others therefore the videos capturing themselves from the conversation partners and environment become important for thinking back to the situations where they were placed.

© 2019, Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature. We argue that studies on embodied knowledge should deal with the process of how knowledge is learned, if we consider the essential meaning of the notion of “embodiment”. In other words, those studies are supposed to deal with the flow of time as the learner lives a life, because learning of embodied knowledge is intrinsically embedded in minds, social contexts, and life. Then, in examinations of learning embodied knowledge or skills, the rigid application of the three principles of modern science, i.e., universality, objectivity, and logicality, will hamper capturing the realities that are rich in “embodiment” aspects in living, such as subjectivity, situated-ness, peculiarity of persons, places and times, and multiplicity of meanings. The purpose of this paper is to discuss methodological and philosophical issues involved in studies on embodied knowledge. Further, we argue that one promising method of studies may be that of embodied metacognition; that enables examinations of the processes of learning involving rich aspects of “embodiment” in living. Finally, we discuss its relationship with the methodology of constructive science and with the notion of narrative approach to human practical intelligence in living people.

We have developed the tool which is specialized to the target that a user is able to construct a word network while evaluating what word to set as a node. A co-occurrence network of words is a complex network with huge number of nodes and links and is not capable for man to interpret as it is. Therefore, we have designed its interface that displays a network as network confines gradually expand in order to users can interpret. This led to the solution that tool users search for interesting relations among words by clarifying difference between one's hypothesis and the fact from data. © 2010 IEEE.

A famous learning paradox is that people without experience of designing do not understand teachers' words about what design is. In order to understand it well, there is no other way than embarking on designing in spite of a lack of that understanding and absorbing the true meaning of finding cues and variables, framing a problem, solving it and re-finding something new that was unexpected in the previous problem-framing. Then, all we reserachers and design teachers could or should do is to motivate students to dare to embark on designing. One promising way to motivate them is to provide stories on meta-cognitive processes from the perspective of internal observation. The present paper claims that metacognition serves as an effective tool to drive the process of exploration through finding cues, framing a problem and externalizing a solution and thereby to provide stories from the view of internal observation.

Sketches serve to externalize ideas, render fleeting ideas permanent, confer coherence on scattered concepts, and turn internal thoughts public. They can be created and recreated, examined and re-examined, configured and reconfigured, considered and reconsidered, for clarity and for creativity. The schematic vocabulary of sketches allows both expression and discovery of ideas. Sketching is integral to design, where vagueness encourages reinterpretation and discourages fixation. Using sketches to those ends requires constructive perception, a combination of a perceptual skill of reconfiguring and a cognitive skill of finding remote associations.

Based on the conjecture that acquisition of embodied expertise is a phenomenon that occurs through interactions among the learner's verbal thoughts, perception, physical movements and the surrounding environment, Suwa [2005b] has claimed the significance of dealing with subjective data such as verbalized thoughts in researches on embodied skills, and has advocated a theory on meta-cognitive verbalization. The present paper, based on the empirical findings in playing darts game, provides a cognitive model of embodied meta-cognitive verbalization, This model theorizes what kinds of cognitive processes involve embodied meta-cognitive verbalization, and how these processes change a learner's thoughts, perception, actions and self-awareness to those, and thereby promote acquisition of embodied expertise.