INSPIRE: Dynamical Principles of Animal Movement

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This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Perception, Action, and Cognition Program and the Linguistics Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and the Animal Behavior Program in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems in the Directorate for Biology.There is enormous diversity in the ways that animals move, from crawling and swimming to courtship displays and talking. Of special interest is whether the context of the movement, such as whether or not it performs a communicative function, fundamentally changes the coordination principles. The proposed research brings together an interdisciplinary team of biologists, linguists, and psychologists to investigate the movements of a diverse set of animals: human, octopus, and a nematode worm. The work allows, for the first time, a comparison of communicative and non-communicative actions both within and between animal species. The cross-species comparisons also allow an exploration of how symbolic and discrete linguistic communication in humans could have evolved from the continuously moving tongue and arms. More generally, movement control systems, in common with the human linguistic system, have a generative capacity to create new functional complex movements (or sentences) from smaller subparts. Does muscular control underlie this generative capacity in any way? The inclusion of both dysarthric speech movements and signed speech enhances the broader impacts of these experiments. In addition, the worm C. elegans shows promise as a model for the dysarthria that occurs in Parkinson's disease; dopamine synthesis and uptake in C. elegans will be manipulated so as to model the abnormal dopamine signaling in people with Parkinson's disease. The investigators have also partnered with the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative to bring the research to the attention of students in local high schools, especially those serving minority students under-represented in science.