© The University of Tokyo, All Rights Reserved.
© The University of Tokyo, All Rights Reserved.
Our department has a long history. The department was founded in 1903 as the first experimental laboratory for psychology in Japan. Since then, our faculty members have been contributing to the research and education in basic psychological science. The department is currently led by three professors, one associate professor, and two assistant professors. Our department is home to about 70 people including graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows (JSPS research fellows, etc.), and research students. We are engaged in experimental studies focusing on basic psychological processes, such as perception, attention, learning, memory, emotion, and social cognition. We take interdisciplinary approaches utilizing methods in psychophysics, neuroscience, and cognitive science.
Each year, more than 20 undergraduate students join our department after finishing their Junior Division program at the College of Arts and Science, The University of Tokyo. The undergraduate students acquire an extensive amount of psychology-related knowledge by attending seminars and advanced lectures. Through the laboratory course in experimental psychology, they also learn computer programming, data-collection and analysis techniques, and academic writing skills. In their senior year, undergraduate students are required to work on their original research projects and write bachelor’s theses under the guidance of their advisers.
The graduate students obtain the knowledge and skills to design original psychological experiments by attending the advanced seminars and receiving project supervisions from the faculties. They are also encouraged and supported to take the opportunities of using various research facilities, available inside and outside the university, and of interacting with domestic and international researchers. Every year, several new Ph.D.s in Psychology are born from our department.
Each faculty member belongs to academic societies in their research domains (e.g., The Japanese Psychological Association, The Japanese Psychonomic Society, Vision Society of Japan, The Japan Neuroscience Society, The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology, and Japanese Cognitive Science Society). They work on publishing their research progresses in international journals and actively participate in domestic and international conferences where they are often asked to give lectures. Our faculties have extensive connections with researchers both inside and outside the university and pursue many collaborative projects.
Please note that our department does not cover all psychology topics but focuses on the researches in fundamental aspects of psychology.
Other departments and divisions at The University of Tokyo (such as Departments of Social Psychology , Educational Psychology and Clinical Psychology ) also offer education and research opportunities in the field of psychology.