Dr. Hironori Nakatani won the best poster award at RIKEN BSI Retreat 2011 held at Kasuizawa on Oct 30 -Nov. 1, 2011. The presentation titlle is "Phase synchrony between the frontal and the temporal brain activities characterizes expert memory performances of shogi (Japanese chess) players"
Dr. Florence Kleberg won the best poster ward at ICCN 2011. The awarded paper is "Prestimulus neural oscillations contribute to recollection and familiarity" by Florence Kleberg, Keichi Kitajo, Masahiro Kawasaki , Yoko Yamaguchi,
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We have started this fiscal year with cherry blossoms at Wako RIKEN campus.
We would like to express our heartfelt sympathy to people affected by the disaster on March 11. We also express our deep thanks to all of you for your warm thoughts and kind messages to Japan. Our lab at RIKEN Wako campus has no serious damage, while due to scheduled electricity power outage, our home page may stop in an irregular way. Thank you for your understanding.
Yoko Yamaguchi
Laboratory Head
Lab for Dynamics of Emergent Intelligence, RIKEN BSI
Two recent awards
Excellent Presentation Award was presented to Dr.Masahiro Kawasaki at 2009 Human Communication Group Symposium held at Sapporo in December 2009 from The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. The title of his presentation was "Social Reward Motivation Increase Working Memory Capacity". Hot Topics Award was presented to Dr.Hironori Nakatani from RIKEN BSI Retreat 2009 Organizing Committee (November 2009). The title of his presentation was "Expert memory in shogi (a Japanese chess); memory strategy and EEG spectra characterize level of expertise".
RIKEN SYMPOSIUM " RIKEN BSI symposium on Hippocampus "
We held a symposium entitled " RIKEN BSI symposium on Hippocampus " at Okouchi Hall (RIKEN, Wako-shi) on September 14, 2009.
More than a hundred foreign and domestic people gathered at the event. Thanks to all speakers and participants for their wonderfully inspiring talks, stimulating discussions and participation.
Awards won at IJCNN 2009 in Atlanta, USA
Our lab won two awards in International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2009) held on June 15-19 in Atlanta.
2009 INNS young investigator award was presented to Colin Molter for outstanding contribution in the field of neural networks.
IJCNN 2009 runner-up student paper award presented to Utku Salihogle and Hugues Bersini from Brussel Free university, Belgium, and Yoko Yamaguchi,
Colin Molter from RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan for the following paper :
"Online organization of chaotic cell assemblies : A model for the cognitive map formation ?"
Our paper was on a cover of NeuroReport
"Dissociable neural correlates of reorienting within versus across visual hemifields"
Takashi J. Ozaki, Seiji Ogawa and Tsunehiro Takeda
Neuroreport 2009 Mar 25 ; 20 (5) : 497-501 / PMID : 19297739
Neural correlates of reorienting of attention across visual hemifields, which was defined in early psychophysical studies (e.g. Posner, 1980), have been extensively studied. However, those of reorienting within hemifields and whether there are any differences remain unclear. In this study, the author performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to identify neural correlates of reorienting within and across hemifields using a variant of the cueing paradigm. The fMRI data revealed dissociable activations in the right posterior parietal region between reorienting within and across hemifields, whereas common activations appeared in the left posterior parietal region. The present results suggest that reorienting within hemifields differs from the 'classical reorienting' to some extent, whereas reorienting across hemifields does not.
Encouraging Research Work Award
Our presentation, "EEG Dynamics Related with Expertise; Rapid, Knowledge-Guided Perception in Shogi Task", was awarded the encouraging prize by Electronics, Information and Systems Society of The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (Award ceremony was held at Tokushima University in September 2009).
Best Paper Award and Appreciation
Our presentation has won the best poster award in the BSI Retreat, which is the annual workshop of RIKEN BSI. The Best Poster Award was presented to: Sohei Wakisaka, Keiichi Kitajo and Yoko Yamaguchi.
Awarded presentation: "Novel Phenomena between Visual Illusion and Hallucination: way to see your spontaneous activity in the early visual system by yourself ", Sohei Wakisaka, Keiichi Kitajo and Yoko Yamaguchi. BSI Retreat 2008, Karuizawa, JAPAN.
In addition, our robotics research project bridging between computational neuroscience and robotics was appreciated by the programming committee of "WORKSHOP: Hybrid and Adaptive Systems for Real-time Robotics Vision and Control (Nov 28, Massey University, Albany, Auckland, NZ) "
Progress report of shogi-thought process research project
At science agora 2008 ( http://scienceportal.jp/scienceagora/agora2008/ in Japanese),
shogi-thought process research project made a progress report.
The research topic of the project was to understand neural mechanism of intuition.
It was held Nov. 22(Sat) - 24(Mon) at Miraikan (National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Tokyo Odaiba.
We had a talk session on Nov. 23(Sun) (in Japanese).
Cover art of the journal Hippocampus
Our paper entitled :
"Entorhinal Theta Phase Precession Sculpts Dentate Gyrus Place Fields"Hippocampus, Volume 18, Issue 9 (p 919-930)
In this paper, the authors present a realistic computational model of entorhinal grid cells connected to dentate granule cells which explains the formation of hippocampal place fields. While it is agreed that place fields should be created by grid fields (e.g. McNaughton et al. 2006), the underlying mechanisms are still unknwon. In Solstad et al. (2007), it was shown that the formation of place fields necessitated selectivity in their afferents. In Rolls et al. (2007), a kind of selectivity was learned using a competitive network. However, place fields appeared to be smaller than the grid fields. Here, to produce place fields of realistic size, an important functional role is attributed to entorhinal phase precession: only grid cells firing at similar theta phase can be summed up at the connecting hippocampal cell acting as a coincident detector. The authors demonstrate that this mechanism in addition with a realistic Hebbian learning provides the necessary selectivity for the formation of place fields of realistic size.
Flash animation of the computational hypothesis.
Best paper award
Our paper has won the best paper award in the International Joint Conference on Neural Network IJCNN2008, as part
of 2008 World Congress on Computational
Intelligence. The Best Paper Award was presented to: Colin Molter, David Colliaux and Yoko Yamaguchi.
Awarded paper: "Working memory and spontaneous activity of cell assemblies.
A biologically motivated computational model" , C. Molter, D. Colliaux and Y. Yamaguchi. IJCNN 2008, Hong Kong, China, IEEE press, pp 3069-3076 (2008)
RIKEN Open Day (19th April 2008)
Riken held an open day event on the 19th (Sat) April 2008.
DEI Lab made a presentation entitled "Rhythmic brain network"
showing how neural oscillations and synchrony occur and play important roles in implementing brain functions.
We would like to extend our gratitude
for your visiting our lab.
The foundation of RIKEN-BSI TOYOTA collaboration center (BTCC)
BTCC started its activity on Nov, 2007. DEI laboratory joins it as a collaboration laboratory.
The human experiment participant registration system (RIKEN BSI DEI Fellow) has been changed for this purpose.
International School on Neural Nets "E.R. Caianiello" 12th Course Dynamic Brain
5-12 December 2007
Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Studies, ERICE, Sicily - ITALY
http://www.physics.unisa.it/dynamicbrain/
The school was held on the medieval town, Erice.
Lecturers and participants enjoyed exciting lectures and discussions.
The proceedings are to be published from Elsevier.
RIKEN SYMPOSIUM "Brain activity and information integration"
September 13, 2007 Talk Session
Place : Okouchi Hall, RIKEN, Wako-shi
To promote research on information processing in the brain, we held a post Neuro 2007 joint symposium entitled
"Brain activity and information integration".
Thanks to all speakers and participants for their nice talks, hot discussion and attention. -- Organizers
Our paper won a paper award.
The ceremony of the presentation was held at annual meeting of Human Brain Mapping June 2007, Chicago with a donor Prof. Friston. (photo at Tully's Coffee, RIKEN BSI)prize :
2007 Editors Choice Award on the recommendation of the Editorial Board NeuroImage: Systems Neuroscience Section
Paper :
Mizuhara H, Yamaguchi Y,
"Human cortical circuits for central executive function emerge by theta phase synchronization",
NeuroImage Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 232-244 (2007)
Our paper has been selected by members of the EPL Editorial Board as one of their personal highlights from those articles published by the journal in 2006.
Award :
Europhysics Letters, Editorial board highlights of 2006
Paper :
Kitajo K, Yamanaka K, Ward LM, Yamamoto Y,
"Stochastic resonance in attention control.",
Europhysics Letters 76, pp. 1029-1035 (2006)
A special collection of 'highlight' articles has been created at http://herald.iop.org/epl/m66/gbr/link/554/