Mechanisms of Olfactory Communication

本研究的目的是在行为分析的层面上增加我们对社会认知和知觉机制的理解。由于这个特殊的项目涉及到气味的交流，另一个目标是增加我们对嗅觉系统功能和机制的理解。最近的生物学理论强调了个体生物在进化过程中的重要性，但我们对个体识别的机制以及个体感知和个体知识中的物种异同所知甚少。这个项目将调查一些令人惊讶的新现象，这些现象表明动物有专门的感知和/或认知策略，通过调查遗留在环境中的复杂气味阵列来发现关于其他个体的各种信息。这些发现暗示了嗅觉感知的全新过程，以及这些过程背后的神经机制。此外，对这些策略的描述应该提供对个体特征或方面的洞察，这些特征或方面已被证明对动物很重要，因此在它们的行为进化和大脑中完成这种社会知识的模块中也很重要。这些实验至少在三个科学领域具有重要意义，并且在未来很可能有一些实际应用。首先，它们对我们理解动物行为很重要，特别是关于气味如何用于调节社会互动，但更普遍的是关于社会识别，领土，主导下属互动，配偶选择，以及对配偶和其他资源的竞争。研究结果可能对如何在动物园、实验室和宠物笼养中保持健康的动物具有实际意义，而且在野生动物保护区不断缩小的时代，这对野生动物的管理也很重要。其次，它对理解嗅觉的高阶认知过程很重要。第三，研究结果应该有助于我们对人类和其他物种的社会识别过程的认识和理解，这些过程在认知神经科学、人工智能、机器和/或计算机识别过程、安全和执法（例如，来自狗或其他动物的关于犯罪者身份的证据）等领域越来越受到关注。

The goals of this research are to increase our understanding of the mechanisms of social recognition and perception at the behavioral level of analysis. Since this particular project involves communication by odors, another goal is to increase our understanding of the functions and mechanisms of the olfactory system. Recent biological theory has emphasized the importance of the individual organism in the process of evolution, yet we still know very little about the mechanisms of individual recognition and species similarities and differences in the perception of individuals and knowledge of individuals. This project will investigate some surprising new phenomena that suggest that animals have specialized perceptual and/or cognitive strategies to discover a wide variety of information about other individuals by investigation of the complex arrays of scents that are left behind in the environment. These discoveries suggest entirely new processes of olfactory perception and consequently of neural mechanisms underlying these processes. Furthermore, characterization of these strategies should provide insight into the features or aspects of individuals that have proven to be important for animals to know about, and therefore that have been important in the evolution of their behavior and of modules in the brain to accomplish this kind of social knowledge. These experiments have importance for at least three domains of science, and may well have some practical applications in the future. First, they will be important for our understanding of animal behavior, in particular about how scent is used to regulate social interactions, but more generally about social recognition, territoriality, dominant subordinate interactions, mate choice, and competition for mates and other resources. The results may have practical implications for how to maintain healthy animals in captivity in zoos, labs, and as pets, and it could well be important in wildlife management in these times of shrinking reserves for wildlife. Second, it is important for understanding higher-order, cognitive processes in the sense of smell. Third, the results should contribute to our knowledge and understanding of social recognition processes in humans and other species, processes that are gaining increasing attention in areas such as cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, machine and/or computer recognition processes, and security and law enforcement (e.g., evidence from dogs or other animals about the identity of the perpetrator of a crime).