Makino Laboratory

Research

We seek to understand cognitive functions of the mouse by utilizing ideas and technologies from diverse fields of science, including molecular biology, psychology, computer science, AI and physics. In particular, while the mouse is performing a behavioural task, we measure activity of >10,000 cortical neurons with calcium imaging using 2-photon random access mesoscope, a new microscope with an approximately x100 larger field of view (below). We are also incorporating Neuropixels probes in our studies to record from deep brain areas. Current themes of our focus are the following.

Learning in intelligent systems

We aim to study biological and artificial intelligence to (1) understand the brain better and (2) improve machine intelligence. To that end, we extract neural representations from the brain of humans and non-human animals and compare them with those of the machine using deep reinforcement learning algorithms.