Laboratory of Life-cycle Psychology and Neuroscience

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Objective of the laboratory

Human mental functions undergo various changes throughout a human life. Until now psychology and brain science research have taken various approaches to the examination of the effects of those changes and of aging on human cognitive ability, motivation and emotions. However, human cognitive ability, motivation and emotions do not function in isolation. For example, human cognitive development may be largely supported by motivational factors such as intellectual curiosity. A variety of human emotions interact closely with cognitive emotional control. In our approach, summarized by keywords including learning, control function, metacognition, emotion, reward processing, intrinsic motivation and sociality, this laboratory aims to apply a variety of methodologies, including behavioral experiments, brain imaging, longitudinal investigation and computer modeling, to clarify the way(s) in which those mental functions interact and contribute to development across the human life-span.

Major research topics

To clarify the psychological processes by which human intellectual curiosity influences decision making and learning, we will work to:


  1. Clarify how people control their emotions and how those emotions change with age
  2. Examine how human beliefs are formed in society
  3. Examine, by means of longitudinal surveys and experiments, changes in the emotions and the motivation of students throughout adolescence; and the effect of those changes on cognitive function

    4. Remarks

    This laboratory encourages interdisciplinary and international efforts, and actively builds collaborative research networks with researchers from Japan and overseas, reaching beyond the fields of psychology and brain science by bridging to adjacent fields including biology, computer science, statistics, network science, educational science and gerontology.