Satoru Saito, Ph.D.
Professor of Cognitive Psychology
Graduate School of Education
Kyoto University

Japanese　 saito.satoru.2zkyoto-u.ac.jp

 

Research Areas

Our research group examines the cognitive functions that underpin human flexibility by exploring the functions and mechanisms of human memory - an empirical approach, which we call “Memory Science”. Specifically, it focuses on the endogenous processes that regulate mental activities, including those that inhibit the production of habitual behavioral responses under inappropriate circumstances. The ability to match human reactions with the particular goals in individual situations enables the sort of behavioral and cognitive flexibility that promotes survival. One of the most important psychological constructs in this context is Working Memory (WM), which supports the temporary storage of relevant information and which constitutes an integral component in the functioning of executive control.

Publications (present - 2000)

  • Nishiyama, S., & Saito, S. (in press). Retrieval stopping can reduce distress from aversive memories. Cognition and Emotion.
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  • Yanaoka, K., Michaelson, L. E., Guild, R. M., Dostart, G., Yonehiro, J., Saito, S., Munakata, Y. (in press). Cultures crossing: The power of habit in delaying gratification. Psychological Science.
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  • Araya, C., Oberauer, K., & Saito, S. (in press). The Hebb repetition effect in complex span tasks: Evidence for a shared learning mechanism with simple span tasks. Memory & Cognition.
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  • Yanaoka, K., van 't Wout , F., Saito, S., & Jarrold, C. (in press). Prior task experience increases five-year-old children’s use of proactive control: Behavioral and pupillometric evidence. Developmental Science.
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  • Yanaoka, K., & Saito, S. (2022). The development of learning, performing, and controlling repeated sequential actions in young children. Topics in Cognitive Science, 14, 241-257.
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  • Nishiyama, S., & Saito, S. (2021). Transferable inhibition of direct suppression: Evidence from a dot-probe task. Psychologia, 63, 20-41.
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  • Yanaoka, K., & Saito, S. (2021). Contribution of executive functions to learning sequential actions in young children. Child Development, 95 (4), e581-e598.
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  • Ishiguro, S., & Saito, S. (2021). The detrimental effect of semantic similarity in short-term memory tasks: A meta-regression approach. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28, 384-408.
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  • Munakata, Y., Yanaoka, K., Doebel, S., Guild, R. M., Michaelson, L. E., & Saito, S. (2020). Group influences on children’s delay of gratification: Testing the roles of culture and personal connections. Collabra: Psychology, 6(1), 1. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.265
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  • Saito, S., Nakayama, M., & Tanida, Y. (2020). Verbal working memory, long-term knowledge, and statistical learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29 (4), 340-345.
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  • Yanaoka, K., Moriguchi, Y., & Saito, S. (2020). Cognitive and neural underpinnings of goal maintenance in young children. Cognition, 203.
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  • Ishiguro, S., & Saito, S. (2019). Social dimensions in similarity judgment of faces. Psychologia, 61(4), 252-268.
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  • Ishiguro, S., & Saito, S. (2019). Person-based organisation in working memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72 (6), 1439-1452.
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  • Maehara, Y., Saito, S., & Towse, J. N. (2019). Joint cognition and the role of human agency in random number choices. Psychological Research, 83(3), 574–589. (The data available from https://dx.doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/researchdata/187)
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  • Morita, A., & Saito, S. (2019). Homophone advantage in sentence acceptability judgment: An experiment with Japanese kanji words and articulatory suppression technique. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48(2), 501–518.
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  • Sukegawa, M., Ueda, Y., & Saito, S. (2019). The effects of Hebb repetition learning and temporal grouping in immediate serial recall of spatial location. Memory & Cognition, 47, 643-657.
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  • Tanida, Y., Nakayama, M., & Saito, S. (2019). The interaction between temporal grouping and phonotactic chunking in short-term serial order memory for novel verbal sequences. Memory, 27 (4), 507-518.
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  • Yanaoka, K., Nakayama, M., Jarrold C., & Saito, S. (2019). Determining the developmental requirements for Hebb repetition learning in young children: Grouping, short-term memory, and their interaction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(4), 573–590.
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  • Yanaoka, K., & Saito, S. (2019). Repeated sequential action by young children: Developmental changes in representational flexibility of task context. Developmental Psychology, 55 (4), 780-792.
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  • Nakayama, M., & Saito, S. (2017). Position-element frequency learning is dissociable from Hebb repetition learning. Journal of Memory and Language, 94, 235-253.
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  • Yanaoka, K., & Saito, S. (2017). Developing control over the execution of scripts: The role of maintained hierarchical goal representations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 163, 87-106.
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  • Ishibashi, R., Pobric, G., Saito, S., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2016). The neural network for tool-related cognition: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of 70 neuroimaging contrasts. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 33, 241-256.

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  • Iveson, M. H., Tanida, Y., & Saito, S. (2016). Same task rules, different responses: Goal neglect, stimulus-response mappings and response modalities. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1968-1973.
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  • Logie, R. H., Saito, S., Morita, A., Varma, S., & Norris, D. (2016). Recalling visual serial order for verbal sequences. Memory & Cognition, 44 (4), 590-607.
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  • Soemer, A., & Saito, S. (2016). Domain-specific processing in short-term serial order memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 88, 1-17.
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  • Towse, J. N., Towse, A. S., Saito, S., Maehara, Y., Miyake, A. (2016). Joint cognition: Thought contagion and the consequences of cooperation when sharing the task of random sequence generation. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0151306. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.015130
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  • Utsumi, K., & Saito, S. (2016). When remembering the past suppresses memory for future actions. Memory, 24, 437-443.
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  • Nakayama, M., Tanida, Y., & Saito, S. (2015). Long-term phonological knowledge supports serial ordering in working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41, 1570-1578.
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  • Soemer, A., & Saito, S. (2015). Maintenance of auditory-nonverbal materials in working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22, 1777-1783.
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  • Tanida, Y., Ueno, T., Lambon Ralph, M. A., & Saito, S. (2015). The roles of long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge in phonological short-term memory. Memory & Cognition, 43, 500-519.
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  • Tanida, Y., Ueno, T., Lambon Ralph, M. A., & Saito, S. (2015). The influence of accent pattern typicality on immediate and delayed nonword repetition. Psychologia, 58, 145-154.
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  • Nakayama, M., & Saito, S. (2014). Within-word serial order control: Adjacent mora exchange and serial position effects in repeated single-word production. Cognition, 131 (3). 415-430.
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  • Saito, S. (2014). Working memory and education: Recent advances in cognitive psychology. The Annual Report of Educational Psychology in Japan, 53, 120-132. (an invited review in English)
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  • Shimotake, A., Matsumoto, R., Ueno, T., Kunieda, T., Saito, S., Hoffman, P., Kikuchi, T., Fukuyama, H., Miyamoto, S., Takahashi, R., Ikeda, A., Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2014). Direct exploration of the role of the anterior temporal lobe in semantic memory: Cortical stimulation and local field potential evidence from subdural grid electrodes. Cerebral Cortex, 1–16. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhu262
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  • Tanaka, T., Saito, S., & Kikuchi, S. (2014). The role of sentence information in reading span performance: An examination of the Recall Reconstruction Hypothesis. Psychologia, 27, 164-176.
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  • Tanaka, T., Sugimoto, M., Tanida, Y., & Saito, S. (2014). The influences of working memory representations on long-range regression in text reading: An eye-tracking study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8: Article 765. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00765
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  • Ueno, T., Saito, S., Saito, A., Tanida, Y., Patterson, K., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2014). Not lost in translation: Generalization of the Primary Systems Hypothesis to Japanese-specific language processes. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(2), 433?446.
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  • Maehara, Y., & Saito, S. (2013). Cognitive load on working memory both encourages and discourages biased reasoning about the mental states of others. Australian Journal of Psychology, 65, 163-171.
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  • Saeki, E., Baddeley, A. D., Hitch, G. H., & Saito, S. (2013). Breaking a habit: A further role of the phonological loop in action control. Memory & Cognition, 41, 1065-1078.
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  • Ueno, T., & Saito, S. (2013). The role of visual representations within working memory for paired-associates and serial order of spoken words. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 1858-1872.
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  • Saeki, E., & Saito, S. (2012). Differential effects of articulatory suppression on cue-switch and task-switch trials in random task cueing with 2:1 mapping. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65 (8), 1599-1614.
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  • Sakuma, Y., & Saito, S. (2012). The positive influence of English-language activities on English digit-span performance among Japanese elementary school children: A three-year cross-sequential study. Psychologia, 55, 257-268.
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  • Ishibashi, R., Lambon Ralph, M. A., Saito, S., & Pobric, G. (2011). Different roles of lateral anterior temporal lobe and inferior parietal lobule in coding function and manipulation tool knowledge: Evidence from an rTMS study. Neuropsychologia, 49, 1128-1135.
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  • Ishibashi, R., & Saito, S. (2011). The role of canonical hand representations and spatiolateral semantics in mental rotation of hands. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23, 633-640.
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  • Maehara, Y., & Saito, S. (2011). I see into your mind too well: Working memory adjusts the probability judgment of others’ mental states. Acta Psychologica, 138, 367-376.
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  • Ueno, T., Allen, R. A., Baddedey, A. D., Hitch, G. J., & Saito, S. (2011). Disruption of visual feature binding in working memory. Memory & Cognition, 39 (1), 12-23.
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  • Ueno, T., Saito, S., Rogers, T. T., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2011). Lichtheim 2: Synthesising aphasia and the neural basis of language in a neurocomputational model of the dual dorsal-ventral language pathways. Neuron, 72, 385-396.
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  • Yuzawa, M., Saito, S., Gathercole, S. E., Yuzawa, M., & Sekiguchi, M. (2011). The effects of prosodic features on nonword repetition performance among young Japanese children. Japanese Psychological Research, 53 (1), 53-64.
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  • Saito, S., & Tanaka, T. (2010). The visualization of eye movements during reading: An approach to psychological science. In Westgeest, H. et al. (Eds.), Making Research Visible to the World (Pp. 68-72), Amstelveen, Netherlands: Canon Foundation in Europe.
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  • Maehara, Y., & Saito, S. (2009). The processing-storage relationship in working memory span: From a perspective of a representation-based interference view. Psychologia, 52, 1-12.
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  • Saeki, E., & Saito, S. (2009). Verbal representation in task order control: An examination with transition and task cues in random task switching. Memory & Cognition, 37, 1040-1050.
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  • Saito, S., Jarrold, C., & Riby, D. M. (2009). Exploring the forgetting mechanisms in working memory: Evidence from a reasoning span test. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1401-1419.
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  • Saito, S., Logie, R. H., Morita, A., & Law, A. (2008). Visual and phonological similarity effects in verbal immediate serial recall: A test with Kanji materials. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 1-17.
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  • Maehara, Y., & Saito, S. (2007). The relationship between processing and storage in working memory span: Not two sides of the same coin. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 212-228.
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  • Morita, A., & Saito, S. (2007). The homophone effect in semantic access tasks using Kanji words: Its relation to the articulatory suppression effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 581-600.
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  • Saito, S., & Towse, J. N. (2007). Working memory as a construct in cognitive science: An illustrious past and a highly promising future. Psychologia, 50, 69-75.
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  • Saeki, E., Saito, S., & Kawaguchi, J. (2006). Effects of response-stimulus interval manipulation and articulatory suppression on task switching. Memory, 14, 965-976.
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  • Saito, S. (2006). Memory function and short-term store as a psychological construct: Implications of a working memory framework. Japanese Journal of Psychonomic Science, 25, 53-60.
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  • Takahashi, M., Shimizu, H., Saito, S., & Tomoyori, H. (2006). One percent ability and ninety-nine percent perspiration: A study of a Japanese memorist. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 1195-1200.
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  • Yuzawa, M., & Saito, S. (2006). The role of prosody and long-term phonological knowledge in Japanese children's nonword repetition performance. Cognitive Development, 21, 146-157.
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  • Saeki, E., & Saito, S. (2004). Effect of articulatory suppression on task switching performance: Implications for models of working memory. Memory,12, 257-271.
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  • Saeki, E., & Saito, S. (2004). The role of the phonological loop in task switching performance: The effect of articulatory suppression in the alternating runs paradigm. Psychologia, 47, 35-43.
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  • Saito, S. & Baddeley, A. D. (2004). Irrelevant sound disrupts speech production: Exploring the relationship between short-term memory and experimentally induced slips of the tongue. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57A, 1309-1340.
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  • Saito, S. & Miyake, A. (2004). On the nature of forgetting and the processing-storage relationship in reading span performance. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 425-443.
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  • Takahashi, M. & Saito, S. (2004). Does test delay eliminate collaborative inhibition? Memory, 12, 722-731.
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  • Saito, A. & Saito, S. (2002).  Experimentally induced verbal slips in Japanese: Evidence from a phonological bias technique. In K. Yasue, M. Jibu, and T. Della Senta (Eds.), No Matter, Never Mind (Advances in Consciousness Research 33) (pp. 273-279), Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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  • Saito, S. (2001). The phonological loop and memory for rhythms: An individual differences approach. Memory, 9, 313-322.
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