Kei Watanabe

Main Lab Location：

Osaka Univ. (Suita Campus)

Specific Research Topic：

Neural mechanisms of executive control in primate prefrontal cortex, Neuronal basis of working memory processing, Awake macaque fMRI and multimodal brain mapping, Frontopolar cortex function and prefrontal functional gradients

Mailing Address：

D303, Nanobiology Building, 1-3 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871

Email：

watanabe.kei.fbs at osaka-u.ac.jp

We study the neural basis of higher cognition in the primate prefrontal cortex, using large-scale single-neuron recordings and awake fMRI to map functional organization and to dissect working memory, cognitive control, learning/value signals, and frontopolar cortex dynamics.

Selected Publications：

Reiji Tanaka, Kei Watanabe*, Hiroshi Ban, Shigeru Kitazawa* (2025) Neural encoding of temporal and spatial plausibility in naturalistic motion: an awake monkey fMRI study. Neuropsychologia 208: 109247, p1-13. *Co-corresponding author

Reiji Tanaka†, Kei Watanabe*†, Takafumi Suzuki, Kae Nakamura, Masaharu Yasuda, Hiroshi Ban, Ken-ichi Okada, Shigeru Kitazawa (2024) An easy-to-implement, non-invasive head restraint method for monkey fMRI. NeuroImage 285: 120479, p1-11.†Co-first; *Corresponding

Jake P. Stroud, Kei Watanabe, Takafumi Suzuki, Mark G. Stokes, Máté Lengyel (2023) Optimal information loading into working memory explains dynamic coding in the prefrontal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 120: p1-12.

Kei Watanabe, Mikiko Kadohisa, Makoto Kusunoki, Mark J. Buckley, John Duncan (2023) Cycles of goal silencing and reactivation underlie complex problem-solving in primate frontal and parietal cortex. Nature Communications 14: p1-18.

Kei Watanabe, Shintaro Funahashi (2014) Neural mechanisms of dual-task interference and cognitive capacity limitation in the prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience 17: p601-611.