At the 19th Motor Control Conference, Kenta Matsumoto (2nd-year Master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance) from Professor Junichi Ushiyama's laboratory in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies received the "Young Investigator Award," and Hirotaka Sugino (3rd-year Ph.D. program student, Graduate School of Media and Governance) received the "Popular Presentation Award."
The Motor Control Conference is an academic society where participants from various fields such as physiology, biology, engineering, medical sciences, rehabilitation, and sports science, who study motor control mechanisms across Japan, gather to report and discuss their respective research results. It is held annually with the keywords of "nurturing young researchers" and "interdisciplinary nature."
The "Young Investigator Award" was established to encourage the research of outstanding young researchers responsible for motor control research and to further revitalize the Motor Control Conference. It is selected from general presentations where researchers within five years of obtaining their doctoral degree (including those who have not yet obtained a doctoral degree) present as the first author. It is a remarkable achievement for a graduate student to receive this award while many postdoctoral researchers are competing. Additionally, the "Popular Presentation Award" was established to evaluate excellent research regardless of research history and to revitalize presentations and participation in the annual meeting. It is selected by the votes of all participants from all general presentations, including symposia.
Presentation Title
【Young Investigator Award】
Latent Storage and Periodic Reactivation of Memory Information Due to Increased Working Memory Load Appear in Response Time
Kenta Matsumoto
【Popular Presentation Award】
Functional Involvement of Subcortical Motor Pathways in Fastest Feedback Control According to Task Demands
Hirotaka Sugino
Comment from Kenta Matsumoto
I am very honored to receive such a prestigious award as the Young Investigator Award. In this study, I attempted to clarify the state in which humans maintain short-term memory using behavioral data. It is a great honor to receive such an award for data that I have a strong emotional attachment to, having built it up since my second year of undergraduate studies. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Ushiyama for his many discussions and precise guidance, to my co-researcher Takuya Deriha (3rd-year Ph.D. program student, Graduate School of Media and Governance), to everyone in the laboratory, to the judges who reviewed the work, and to the conference secretariat and organizers. I will continue to work hard to make this even better research.
Comment from Hirotaka Sugino
This research challenges the question of how the "cerebral cortex" of the human brain and the "subcortical regions," which are lower-level areas, each control our movements. I am very honored that the results I have steadily built up since the development of the experimental method have been recognized with this prestigious award. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Ushiyama for his many discussions and guidance, to my co-researcher Professor Daichi Nozaki (Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo), to everyone in the laboratory, to the members of the academic society who voted, and to the conference secretariat and organizers. Encouraged by this award, I will continue to strive for further excellence.
Source: Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office, General Affairs