IBSS: The Interrelated Development of Language and Technology

这个跨学科的研究项目将研究语言和技术，两个定义人类特征，是如何相互关联的。 该项目将侧重于人类技术的发展，从早期的进化过渡，如石器制造和饮食和栖息地的扩张，到最近的转型，如农业，工业和信息革命，以加强对这些不断加速变化的模式的基本理解，包括语言的起源。 研究人员将通过整合考古学和神经科学方法来研究语言和工具制造之间可能的功能，解剖学和进化联系，来测试语言是技术中明显的复杂，分层结构，目标导向行为的更一般能力的特殊情况。 通过调查语言和工具制造之间可能的神经重叠，该项目将测试主要的进化假设，并通过开发新的和广泛适用的方法来研究复杂的自然行为，促进神经科学和人类学之间的整合。 这个项目将追求的假设，层次结构是一个统一的原则，在人类认知，跨越行为领域，传统上被认为是不同的。 项目的发现将有可能对人类智能的本质和起源产生强大的影响。为了解决有关语言和技术如何相互关联的问题，该项目将专注于与进化相关的，考古学上可见的石器制作行为。 路易斯·利基（Louis Leakey）评论说，石器工具代表了一种“人类行为”的形式，可以用来推断人类灵巧性、认知和文化传播过程的进化。早期石器时代约占人类史前史的90%，涵盖了距今约260万年至25万年的时间段。 石器的发展包括从简单的石屑到巧妙成形的工具的技术进步，以及大脑大小增加了近三倍。 现代人类大脑结构和功能的许多独特方面可能都是在这一时期进化而来的。 为了使用神经科学的现代方法来研究这种典型的人类技术，研究人员将教实验对象制作旧石器时代的工具。 学习过程的认知，行为和神经生理学方面将使用功能性脑成像，眼动追踪，注释和视频记录的工具制作动作序列的分析，以及实际生产的工具的考古学分析进行调查。 利用形式语言理论，研究人员将开发新的方法来描述这些自然动作序列的句法结构，并测量其层次复杂性。由专家观察员手动解析动作序列将与基于研究对象的眼动模式的动作流的数据驱动分割进行比较，以产生强大的共识。这些“动作句法”分析方法将推广到其他复杂行为，并将使本研究中的语言（故事听）和工具制作（动作观察）行为的层次结构，信息处理和大脑功能直接比较。 该项目通过NSF跨学科行为和社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛获得支持。

This interdisciplinary research project will examine how language and technology, two defining human characteristics, are related to one another. The project will place emphasis on the development of human technology from early evolutionary transitions, such as stone tool-making and expansions of diets and habitats, to more recent transformations, such as agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions, in order to enhance basic understanding of these patterns of ever accelerating change, including the origins of language. The investigators will test the hypothesis that language is a special case of a more general capacity for complex, hierarchically structured, goal-oriented behavior evident in technology by integrating archaeological and neuroscience methods to investigate possible functional, anatomical, and evolutionary connections between language and tool-making. By investigating possible neural overlap between language and tool-making, the project will test major evolutionary hypotheses and promote integration between neuroscience and anthropology by developing new and broadly applicable methods for studying complex, naturalistic behavior. This project will pursue the hypothesis that hierarchical structure is a unifying principle in human cognition, crossing behavioral domains that are traditionally conceived as distinct. Project findings will have the potential to powerfully impact perceptions of the nature and origins of human intelligence.To address questions regarding how language and technology are related to each other, this project will focus on the evolutionarily relevant, archaeologically visible behavior of stone tool-making. Louis Leakey commented that stone tools represent a form of "fossilised behavior" that can be used to make inferences about the evolution of human dexterity, cognition, and cultural transmission processes. The Early Stone Age accounts for roughly 90 percent of human prehistory, covering a time period from roughly 2.6 million years to 250,000 years before the present. The development of stone tools encompassed a technological progression from simple stone chips to skillfully shaped tools as well as a nearly three-fold increase in brain size. It is likely that many distinctive aspects of modern human brain structure and function evolved during this period. In order to study this proto-typical human technology using the modern methods of neuroscience, the investigators will teach experimental subjects to make Paleolithic tools. Cognitive, behavioral, and neurophysiological aspects of the learning process will be investigated using functional brain imaging, eye-tracking, the annotation and analysis of video-recorded tool-making action sequences, and archaeological analyses of the actual tools produced. Drawing on formal language theory, the researchers will develop new methods for describing the syntactic structure of these natural action sequences and for measuring their hierarchical complexity. Manual parsing of action sequences by expert observers will be compared with the data-driven segmentation of action streams based on the eye-movement patterns of research subjects in order to produce a robust consensus. These methods of "action syntax" analysis will be generalizable to other complex behaviors and will enable the direct comparison of hierarchical structure, information processing, and brain function across linguistic (story listening) and tool-making (action observation) behaviors in this study. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.