Research Area	Behavioral neuroscience, Visual Ecology
Lab Website	Lab Website
ResearchMap	https://researchmap.jp/m_kinoshita/
E-mail	kinoshita_michiyo (at) soken.ac.jp

My research interest is how beautiful swallowtail butterflies, Papilio xuthus, see this world in terms of their visual perception and neural mechanism. So far I have focused on this flower-visiting behavior of the butterflies and clarified their visual abilities through physiological-behavioral experiments. Then my team found that their perceptual world is more sophisticated than our expectation. In especially I amazed that they can discriminate only one nm-difference as different colors at three wavelength regions, and e-vector angle of polarized light as different brightness. These their visual abilities must be represented in their tiny brain of approximately 1 mm³. We are therefore conducting various neurophysiological experiment to investigate how visual information is processed in a such small brain. In the future, I would like to expand my research to understanding the coevolution of different organisms by interpreting the relationship between the perceptual world of Lepidopteran insects and the various characteristics of flowers from both neurobehavioral and behavioral ecology perspectives.

Selected Publications, Books etc.

• 1.Kinoshita M, Arikawa K. (2023) ‘Color’ Processing in the butterfly visual system. Trends in Neuroscience 46:338-340.
• 2.Matsushita A, Stewart F, Ilic M, Chen P, Wakita D, Miyazaki M, Murata K, Kinoshita M, Belusic G, Arikawa K. (2022) Connectome of the lamina reveals the circuit for early colour processing in the butterfly visual pathway. Current Biology 32:2291-2299.
• 3.Céchetto C, Arikawa K, Kinoshita M. (2022) Motion-sensitive neurons activated by chromatic contrast in a butterfly visual system. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B dio: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0277.
• 4.Kinoshita M, Stewart JF. (2022) Cortical-like colour-encoding neurons in the mushroom body of a butterfly. Current Biology 32:114-115.
• 5.Kinoshita M, and Stewart JF. (2020) Retinal organization and visual abilities for flower foraging in swallowtail butterflies. Current Opinion in Insect Science 42:76-83.
• 6.Yoshida M, Ito Y, Ômura H, Arikawa K, Kinoshita M. (2015) Plant scent modify innate colour preference in foraging swallowtail butterflies. Biology Letters 11(7): 20150390.
• 7.Kinoshita M, Shimohigasi M, Tominaga Y, Arikawa K, Homberg U (2015) Topographically distinct visual and olfactory inputs to the mushroom body in the swallowtail butterfly, Papilio xuthus. Journal of Comparative Neurology. 523:162-182.
• 8.Kinoshita M, Arikawa K (2014) Color and polarization vision in foraging Papilio. Journal of Comparative Physiology A. 200: 513-526.