Plasticity, innateness, and the path to language in the primate brain: Comparing macaque, chimpanzee and human circuitry for visuomotor integration
Plasticity, innateness, and the path to language in the primate brain: Comparing macaque, chimpanzee and human circuitry for visuomotor integration
复制标题
灵长类大脑的可塑性、先天性和语言路径：比较猕猴、黑猩猩和人类视觉运动整合电路
DOI：
10.1075/is.17039.hec
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发表时间：
2018
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Hecht, Erin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hecht, Erin
许多研究者认为语言是人类独有的。然而，越来越多的证据表明，语言是通过对神经系统的一系列适应而出现的，这些适应支持早期的视觉整合和手动操作能力。本文回顾了这些适应的进化过程的比较神经科学证据。一个突出的问题是如何机械地解释新的能力从预先存在的电路的出现。一种可能性是，人类大脑可能经历了更大的可塑性选择，减少了大脑组织的硬连线程度，并增加了社会传播的程度，学习行为。使这些新能力更容易或更快学习的突变将经历积极的选择，随着时间的推移，曾经与个体神经可塑性相关的神经变化将趋于遗传，先天和固定。然而，很明显，语言并不完全是“与生俱来的”;它不会在没有必要的环境输入和经验的情况下出现。因此，对语言进化的机械解释必须解决内在的权衡，即底层神经系统对环境输入的灵活性和敏感性的进化压力与随着时间的推移不断适应的行为以早期出现的，渠道化的，不太灵活的方式可靠地表达的趋势之间的内在权衡。
Many researchers consider language to be definitionally unique to humans. However, increasing evidence suggests that language emerged via a series of adaptations to neural systems supporting earlier capacities for visuomotor integration and manual action. This paper reviews comparative neuroscience evidence for the evolutionary progression of these adaptations. An outstanding question is how to mechanistically explain the emergence of new capacities from pre-existing circuitry. One possibility is that human brains may have undergone selection for greater plasticity, reducing the extent to which brain organization is hard-wired and increasing the extent to which it is shaped by socially transmitted, learned behaviors. Mutations that made these new abilities easier or faster to learn would have undergone positive selection, and over time, the neural changes once associated with individual neural plasticity would tend to become heritable, innate, and fixed. Clearly, though, language is not entirely “innate;” it does not emerge without the requisite environmental input and experience. Thus, a mechanistic explanation for the evolution of language must address the inherent trade-off between the evolutionary pressure for underlying neural systems to be flexible and sensitive to environmental input vs. the tendency over time for continually adaptive behaviors to become reliably expressed in an early-emerging, canalized, less flexible manner.