CAREER: Integrating brain-behavior evolution with real-world science impacts through neuroscience of working dogs

职业：通过工作犬的神经科学将大脑行为进化与现实世界的科学影响相结合

• 批准号: 2238071
• 负责人: Erin Hecht
• 金额: $ 136.1万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-03-01 至 2028-02-29
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2238071&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Integrating; brain; behavior; evolution

Some species of animals have innate predispositions to acquire particular collections of learned skills. This is particularly apparent in working dog breeds, which provides the opportunity to understand this general phenomenon in detail. For example, border collies have an innate interest in sheep and can easily be trained to herd livestock, but this is not the case for pointers, retrievers, and sled dogs, who instead each have their own, different behavioral predispositions. How does this occur? The proposed research explores this question using noninvasive neuroimaging in 220 dogs of 4 breeds, including groups of nonworking companion dogs and working dogs in the real world. The research will examine dogs practicing historical working skills like herding and hunting, as well as more modern skills that directly impact human society, including guide dogs, service dogs, and scent detection dogs. Rigorous analyses of these brain images will identify changes related to innate skill predispositions as well as brain plasticity resulting from learning. Integrated with this research, the project will support coordinated education and research experiences for students at Harvard and elsewhere. In a unique new undergraduate course, students will design and carry out their own dog behavior experiments. Course materials and video data will be made publicly available to extend educational and student research impact beyond the host institution. Additionally, data from the research project will support a variety of independent student projects. Open-access datasets and data analytic tools from the project will support further research at other institutions. Outreach activities will leverage dogs as public-interest “ambassadors for science,” including knowledge exchange with canine professional sectors.Feedback loops between behavior and evolution have been posited since the time of Darwin, but surprisingly little behavioral neuroscience research has probed this topic. This proposal addresses the critical central question, “What is the interplay between plasticity and adaptation in brain evolution?” It explores three distinct hypotheses about how such change could occur in the brain. Working dogs offer a uniquely well-controlled “natural experiment” on this question, because strong and rapid artificial selection by humans has created different breeds with different early-emerging predispositions for learned behaviors. The project’s aims will identify neural correlates of innate predispositions for particular categories of learned skills accrued across generations of evolved change, brain plasticity resulting from learning these skills within a lifetime, and differences between neural correlates of selection for historical and more recent skills. Additionally, the performance ratings of working dog organizations will be used to identify markers of individual variation in real-world working skills, which may have direct applied impacts for breeding and training efforts. These goals will be accomplished using canine-optimized neuroimaging sequences from the Human Connectome Project, including T1- and T2-weighted MRI, diffusion-weighted imaging, and resting state functional connectivity. Comprehensive, whole-brain analyses will examine gray matter morphometry using a priori general linear models and a data-driven multivariate analysis; white matter microstructure; and white matter connectivity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

有些种类的动物具有获得特定习得技能的先天天赋。这一点在工作犬品种中尤为明显，这为详细了解这一普遍现象提供了机会。例如，边境牧羊犬天生对绵羊感兴趣，可以很容易地训练它们放牧，但指针犬、寻回犬和雪橇犬就不是这样，它们都有自己不同的行为倾向。这种情况是如何发生的？这项拟议的研究通过对4个品种的220只狗进行非侵入性神经成像来探索这个问题，其中包括现实世界中的非工作伴侣犬和工作犬。这项研究将检查狗练习历史上的工作技能，如放牧和狩猎，以及更多直接影响人类社会的现代技能，包括导盲犬、服务犬和嗅探犬。对这些大脑图像的严格分析将识别与与生俱来的技能倾向以及学习导致的大脑可塑性有关的变化。与这项研究相结合，该项目将为哈佛和其他地方的学生提供协调的教育和研究体验。在一门独特的本科新课程中，学生们将设计并进行自己的犬类行为实验。课程材料和视频数据将公之于众，以扩大教育和学生研究的影响，超出主办机构的范围。此外，研究项目的数据将支持各种独立的学生项目。该项目的开放获取数据集和数据分析工具将支持其他机构的进一步研究。外展活动将利用狗作为公共利益的“科学大使”，包括与犬类专业部门的知识交流。自达尔文时代以来，就一直假设行为和进化之间存在反馈循环，但令人惊讶的是，很少有行为神经科学研究探索这一主题。这一建议解决了一个关键的中心问题，“大脑进化中可塑性和适应性之间的相互作用是什么？”它探索了关于这种变化如何在大脑中发生的三个不同的假设。在这个问题上，工作犬提供了一个独特的、控制良好的“自然实验”，因为人类强大而快速的人工选择创造了不同的品种，它们具有不同的早期出现的习得行为倾向。该项目的目标将确定在几代人的进化变化中积累的特定类别学习技能的先天易感性的神经相关性，在一生中学习这些技能所产生的大脑可塑性，以及历史技能和最近技能选择的神经相关性之间的差异。此外，工作犬组织的绩效评级将被用来确定真实世界工作技能的个体差异标志，这可能对育种和培训工作产生直接应用影响。这些目标将使用人类连接组项目的犬类优化神经成像序列来实现，包括T1和T2加权MRI、扩散加权成像和静息状态功能连接。全面的全脑分析将使用先验的一般线性模型和数据驱动的多变量分析来检查灰质形态计量学；白质微观结构；以及白质连通性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。