Research Support
SPIRITS

NTU-Kyoto University joint research unit for social cognitive biology on representation of environment

Project Gist

Establish an international research center for social cognitive biology on environment understanding between National Taiwan University and Kyoto University

Keywords

Cognitive neuroscience, Visual cognition, Self, Social cognition, International collaboration

Background and Purpose

The aim of our project is to understand the mechanisms of our understanding of the environment, which is composed of the self, others, and objects, by integrating findings from neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Researchers at National Taiwan University (NTU) and Kyoto University (KU) share these research themes, while they have their own strengths in different methodologies. For example, NTU is strong in biological and computational approaches, whereas KU is strong in functional brain imaging and behavioral experiments. By taking advantage of this complementary relationship, we formed eight research projects on the topics of meditation, synesthesia, vision, visual short-term memory, aging, honesty, statistical learning, and social biology, and performed joint research by combining different methodologies.

Project Achievements

To present our research achievements, we held two international symposia between NTU and KU: July 2016 at KU, and March 2018 at NTU. In addition, we organized symposia at the International Congress of Psychology (ICP) 2016 in Yokohama, Japan in July, and at the International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS) 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan in September. During the program period, members made mutual visits frequently and discussed our research projects deeply. Based on our achievements, to continue our collaboration we applied for the Bilateral Joint Research Project: Open Partnership Program sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and our proposal was accepted. With a minor reorganization, our projects will continue for two more years.

Future Prospects

In the Bilateral Joint Research Project Program, we will continue our collaborative research and expand our themes from the self, others, and objects themselves to interactions among these components. We will facilitate integration and communication among current research projects by considering the following two notions as key factors: metacognition and implicit learning.

Figure

Group picture at the 3rd NTU-Kyoto University international symposium (March 17th, at National Taiwan University)
Poster for the 3rd NTU-Kyoto University international symposium

Principal Investigator

SAIKI Jun

・SAIKI Jun
・Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies
・He received his Ph.D (Psychology) from UCLA in 1996. After teaching at Nagoya University, and the Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University, he moved to his current position. He primarily investigates visual cognition, search science, and the wisdom of crowds. He is eager to create cutting-edge psychological experiments.
http://www.cv.jinkan.kyoto-u.ac.jp/site/