Takashi Kato

Visiting Scholar
School of Education

February 1, 2009

Dr. Kato Collaborates with Dr. Richaldn to Study Student Retention of New Knowledge

Takashi Kato, Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at Kansai University in Japan, is a visiting scholar to the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine, from September 2008 to September 2009. At Kansai University he teaches cognitive science and human-computer interaction and is involved in various research projects such as application of cognitive principles of human learning and memory to developing effective learning strategies, cognitive experimental studies on face and facial-expression recognition, development of evaluation methods for designing usable and accessible Web, and designing effective computer-mediated communication for safety and security information.

Dr. Kato decided to spend his sabbatical at UC Irvine because he was attracted to the learning and cognition projects conducted by Dr. Lindsey E. Richland. He is currently working with Dr. Richland on the issue of how to help students to apply more effective, more elaborative encoding operations for deeper understanding and better retention of new knowledge. He is also gaining valuable insight from Dr. Richland’s research projects that examine cross-cultural differences in the use of cognitive supports in teaching mathematics. Dr. Kato believes that the outcome of his collaboration with Dr. Richland will also be applicable to his research on designing effective computer-mediated communication for safety intelligence, which is his part of the 5-year research project recently granted by the Japanese government to Kansai University.

Dr. Kato, born and raised in Japan, first came to the U.S. as a transfer student from Waseda University in Tokyo and received his B.S. in psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He went on to graduate study and earned his M.A. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Kato held research and teaching appointments at IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, the University of Sydney (Australia), and Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratories (Kyoto, Japan) before joining the faculty at Kansai University.

Professor Kato has published research articles in English and Japanese journals such as Memory & Cognition, Psychological Science, Visual Cognition, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, The Japanese Journal of Cognitive Psychology, The Japanese Journal of Research on Emotions, Information Processing Society of Japan Journal, and The Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers. He also has written and co-edited several books in Japanese such as How to write instruction manuals: Cognitive perspectives, Cognitive psychological guide for computer-screen design, Handbook of research methods for cognitive studies, and Cognitive interface.

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