I am interested in intelligence of lower animals. Intelligence of human beings is their ability to change environment and let it fit to their lives. On the other hand, intelligence of lower animals is their ability to change themselves and harmonize with environment.
I chose pill bugs (Armadillidium vulgare, Isopoda, Crustacean) as subjects and have invented some behavioral experiments to approach to intelligence of lower animals. In the recent experiment, each bug was placed on an annulus-shaped substrate surrounded by water (test condition) or acrylic wall (control condition). Small obstacles were introduced at regular intervals in the middle of the annulus. The bugs, whose eyes can perceive only different shades of light or dark, moved along the water, touching the obstacles repeatedly. However, as they are destined to die staying in water, moving along the water becomes dangerous.
Under such condition, the bugs demonstrated mounting to the obstacles. Sometimes, this mounting behavior was observed recurrently. In the control condition, mounting behavior happened rarely. From these results, we concluded that they gradually learned the arrangement of water and obstacles by touching them with their antennae and tried to mount the obstacles in order to decrease the probability of direct contact with water.
In this tenure-track system, I plan to make automatic video tracking system to observe every antennal movement in the experiment precisely and reveal the patterns of antennal movement that may play a significant role in obtaining external spatial information and expressing the mounting behavior. Starting from this experiment, I try to elucidate the unknown neural mechanism which constructs the global spatial representation from the local antennal inputs and approach intelligence of lower animals.

I would like to establish research group of physiology to elucidate the neural system for the global spatial cognition resulting from the local antennal inputs and that of mathematics and computational science to construct the mathematical model of the neural system.
We can expect that these researches may contribute to the construction of the pill bug robot. In every research process, I try to keep thinking what intelligence of lower animals is, whether there is mind in them or not, and one of the biggest problems in science, what the mind is.