| ■School of Medicine |
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| Second Department of Physiology |
1. General Description of the Department.
- Graduate school education: in charge of Nueroscience
- Undergraduate education: in charge of lecture and laboratory training in
Physiology.
2. The members of the Faculty (Area of Research)Professor: Yu Sato (Neurophysiology)
Associate Professor: Ling Qin (Neurophysiology)
Research Associate: Sohei Chimoto (Neurophysiology)
Research Associate：Masashi Sakai (Neurophysiology)
Engineering Official: Nahomi Yaguchi
3. General Description of the Research Activities (Themes)
 We investigate brain functions by electrophysiological approach: we record
the action potential of a single neuron in the brain and analyze the relationship
between stimuli and responses and between the response and animal behavior.
The aim of the research is to clarify the operation fundamentals of the
brain functions, by comparing the differences in their sensation and motor
control systems between the brain and the computer. We expect that the
findings contribute to advancement in both the communication system and
the medicine.
- 3-1. Auditory information processing in the auditory cortex.
The language recognition process in the brain consists of three stages;
the phonological, meaning, and syntactic stages. In the phonological stage,
the brain analyzes auditory cues of the voice signals. In the field of
engineering, the research on the voice-recognition and voice-production
by computers has been actively conducted up to now, utilizing for automatic
voice-to-text translation and auditory guidance. However, little is known
how acoustic characteristics are analyzed in the phonological stage. We
record single neuron activity in the auditory cortex of animals with microelectrodes
and analyze the relation between neural activity and acoustic cues.
- 3-2. Recognition of human voice.
We investigate the acoustic cues essential and sufficient for the recognition
of the vowels (i e a o u), consonants (t d k etc. ), and the pitch through
psychophysical experiments.
- 3-3. Eye movement control by the brain
We examine motor control mechanism of vestibulo-ocular reflex and optokinetic reflex in animal experiments.
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