Tohoku University · Neuroscience
Professor Motoaki Sugiura's research lab specializes in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on the neural mechanisms underlying memory and belief systems. The lab investigates how the brain processes personally familiar objects and places, with particular emphasis on the posterior cingulate cortex and its role in spatial and nonspatial memory retrieval. Another key direction involves understanding the psychophysical and neurocognitive processes of belief formation, integrating cognitive, emotional, and evaluative components in belief representation. Using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI, the lab explores the functional organization of the brain in relation to self-referential cognition and social perception.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
The recognition of both personally familiar objects and places involves nonspatial memory retrieval processes, but only personally familiar places are represented as space. Although the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is considered to process both types of such memories, its functional organization is poorly understood. In this event-related fMRI study, normal subjects judged familiar/unfamiliar pictures in four categories: familiar places (FP), familiar objects (FO), unfamiliar places (UP), an
Departing from the long debates on the role of faith/belief, recent interdisciplinary research has turned to characterize the features of the psychophysical processes underlying believing. Here we review recent cognitive neuroscience models of the believing process and propose a conceptual framework that integrates current theoretical and empiric knowledge about the processes of believing. There are theories that elegantly explain believing as a self-organization process of cognitive and emotion
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