This award will support the participation of eight U.S. scientists in a U.S.-Japan Seminar on Implications of Contemporary Behavioral Research on Language Pragmatics and Derived Stimulus Relations. The co-organizers of the seminar, which will be held July 13-18, 1992 in Yamanishi, Japan, are Professors Steven Hayes and Linda Hayes, both of the Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, and Professor Masaya Sato, Department of Psychology, Keio University, Tokyo. Researchers in both the United States and Japan have made major contributions to the growing literature on the impact of these research developments on behavioral approaches to the analysis of complex human behavior more generally. This U.S.-Japan seminar will be the first conference to examine the topic. Participants will consider the implications of these new research findings for the analysis of such topics as problem solving, reasoning, choice, self-control, lying, superstition, and imagining. Japanese psychological scientists have long had a particular interest in complex human behavior, and they are especially sensitive to the theoretical implications of these research developments. There is, in addition, a great deal of innovative work on artificial language in primates going on at the Institute of Primate Research at Kyoto University. This work bears on the distinction between human and animal language of considerable interest to U.S. researchers. Conversely, much of the basic behavioral research literature is published by researchers in the United States. By bringing together notable researchers from both countries, the seminar should encourage better coordinated efforts and collaborative research.
