My research focuses on visual information processing and its latent plasticity.

Vision constitutes a large portion of human’s sensation and could involve different mechanisms between primates and other animals. I do visual research using mice and rats in the University-of-Tokyo lab and compensate an important part with human studies in my CiNeT lab.

At CiNET, I mainly use fMRI to reveal how the brain creates the internal representation about 3D and color vision in the low-level visual cortices. This aims to extrapolate my findings on visual cortical plasticity in rodents to the human brain. For example, I recently found simple, specific non-invasive methods can induce a long-lasting, specific alteration of visual responsiveness even after the critical period in mice (unpublished data). We are very interested to examine whether it is applicable to humans – pilot tests imply that it does work. Thus, this technique may be able to restore the lost (or weakened) visual ability in patients.