Our laboratory primarily uses neuroimaging techniques such as MRI and behavioral approaches to research and develop technologies that allow us to gain a deep understanding of human sensory and motor functions and to improve and enhance these functions.

Our interests encompass a wide range of topics from human body perception to motor control and motor learning. For example, body image, brain representations of body awareness and self-consciousness, understanding of others, motor intention, motor imagery, motor adaptation, motor skills, and sensorimotor linkage are major research topics. In MRI research, we use brain function mapping, brain information decoding techniques, and causality analysis to understand the brain mechanisms of human sensory information processing, motor control, and motor learning from both functional and structural aspects of the brain. We are also working to understand the brain systematically through the construction of computational models based on behavioral measurements. Based on this understanding, we are developing methods to effectively improve and enhance human sensory and motor functions using methods such as robotic intervention, neural modification, and complementary sensory feedback.

Our research targets a wide range of subjects, from children to the elderly, from the visually impaired to top athletes, and visualizes functional differentiation associated with development, functional decline with aging, and brain specialization and hyper-adaptive functions observed in disabled people and sports masters to understand the plasticity at the brain network level that occurs throughout the human life span. We are trying to elucidate the rules. In particular, we are focusing on the inhibitory mechanisms that occur in the large-scale networks in the brain that allow various functions of the brain to operate in an orderly fashion, and we are also building computational models of the development and aging of these inhibitory mechanisms. Only through such multifaceted research can a comprehensive understanding of the brain be achieved. Such a comprehensive understanding of the brain will provide the academic foundation for realizing a society in which everyone, from children to the elderly and disabled, can play an active role by making the most of their own brain’s potential adaptability.

We further aim to establish a research framework in which the findings of the above basic research can be seamlessly transferred to real-life settings such as sports and rehabilitation training. To achieve this, we conduct research together with graduate students at Osaka University and are actively engaged in joint research with various universities and companies, including Osaka University.