December 10, 2019
At the 38th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Psychonomic Society, held from November 29 to December 1, Senior Assistant Professor Masaki Mori of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies received the 2018 Japanese Psychonomic Society's Excellent Paper Award. His paper, "Anisotropy of Gaze-Perceived Space," was highly acclaimed as an outstanding work.
This paper was co-authored with Toshio Watanabe, Professor Emeritus of Keio University , a former professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, and they have now received the award jointly.
The Japanese Psychonomic Society is an academic society that facilitates the exchange of information and research discussions on basic experimental psychology—including fields such as sensation, perception, cognition, memory, learning, and animal behavior—and on fundamental issues concerning behavior and the mental functions that support it, such as its history, principles, and methods.
Comments from Senior Assistant Professor Masaki Mori, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
I am greatly honored to receive the prestigious Japanese Psychonomic Society's Excellent Paper Award. This paper, titled "Anisotropy of Gaze-Perceived Space," is a study that experimentally and psychologically examines the properties of gaze direction perception. Gaze direction perception refers to perceiving the point of fixation from the gaze direction of another person facing you. This research was highly praised for clarifying the nature of spatial distortion in gaze direction perception, for deriving a mathematical relationship between the physical point of fixation and the perceived point of fixation, and for its unique experimental method. On the occasion of this award, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my co-author, Dr. Toshio Watanabe, and to all the participants who cooperated in the experiment. I will continue to devote myself even more to research and education in the future.
Comments from Professor Emeritus Toshio Watanabe
I am delighted to have unexpectedly received an award for a research paper upon my retirement. The issue of anisotropy in visual space is a field I have dedicated much effort to researching for a long time, and I feel as though my research has finally borne fruit. In terms of content, it quantitatively measures the level of anisotropy by introducing an affine transformation between physical space and perceived space, and then applies this from visual space to gaze-perceived space. It is a mathematical model that can still be applied to other fields. I first won an award for calligraphy in junior high school, then received an SFC award for education when I began teaching at SFC, and now I have been able to receive an award for research, making it an award for both education and research. I would like to thank everyone around me who gave me these opportunities.
Source: General Affairs Section, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office