Homeostasis and behavioral state organization in infants

描述（由申请人提供）：研究生涯奖将支持正在进行的美国国立卫生研究院资助的关于幼鼠基本生物行为过程的研究，特别是关于体温调节和心血管稳态的行为和生理机制。这些研究结果对婴儿在寒冷环境下的体温调节能力以及体温调节与心血管功能之间的重要联系进行了实质性的重新解释。随着这些研究在过去十年中取得进展，申请人将睡眠/清醒活动作为体温调节能力的众多措施之一。这些研究自然导致了关于主动睡眠的现象学和功能的问题，尽管它在哺乳动物婴儿中普遍存在，但实验和理论的关注仍然相对较少。因此，睡眠研究已成为申请人实验室越来越重要的研究重点，他从独特的发育角度发展了研究婴儿睡眠的新方法和新概念。RCA奖将培养申请人推进研究项目的能力，以解决幼鼠活跃睡眠的神经基质和功能。申请人建议以其实验室最近的调查为基础，使用各种方法学方法（例如，病变，神经记录）系统地检查主动睡眠的发展。该建议采用的发展框架与其他研究者采用的不同之处在于，它没有根据成人的标准来判断婴儿睡眠（这一主题指导了他对婴儿体内平衡的其他研究），而是试图理解随着发育时间睡眠变得越来越复杂和稳定的变化过程。这些实验将有助于建立幼鼠作为理解行为状态组织背后的神经过程的理想模型。这部分提案的第二个目的是将须活动作为幼鼠活跃睡眠的一个额外组成部分，并将须桶系统发展为一个模型系统，用于研究与睡眠相关的自发活动在表征桶系统的地形图发展中的作用。因此，通过在共同的发育框架内关注诸如体内平衡和睡眠等基本重要过程，RCA奖支持的研究将对我们对正常和异常发育的理解产生重大影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A Research Career Award would support on-going NIH-funded investigations of basic biobehavioral processes in infant rats, especially concerning behaviora] and physiological mechanisms of thermoregulatory and cardiovascular homeostasis. These investigations have resulted in substantial reinterpretations of the thermoregulatory competence of infants during cold challenge and the vital connections between thermoregulation and cardiovascular function. As these investigations have advanced over the last decade, the applicant has used sleep/wake activity as one among many measures of thermoregulatory competence. These studies led naturally to questions concerning the phenomenology and function of active sleep, which, despite its ubiquity in infant mammals, continues to receive relatively little experimental and theoretical attention. Thus, the study of sleep has become an increasingly important focus in the applicant's laboratory, and he has developed new methods and concepts for studying infant sleep from a uniquely developmental perspective. An RCA Award would foster the applicant's ability to advance a program of research to address the neural substrates and function of active sleep in infant rats. The applicant proposes to build on recent investigations from his laboratory to examine systematically the development of active sleep using a variety of methodological approaches (e.g., lesions, neural recording). The developmental framework adopted in this proposal differs from that adopted by other investigators in that it does not judge infant sleep against an adult standard (a theme that has guided his other investigations of homeostasis in infants) but rather seeks to understand the processes of change as sleep becomes increasingly complex and stable over developmental time. These experiments will help to establish the infant rat as an ideal model for understanding the neural processes underlying behavioral state organization. A second aim of this part of the proposal is to integrate whisker activity as an additional component of active sleep in infant rats and to develop the whisker barrel system as a model system for examining the role of sleep-related spontaneous activity in the development of the topographic maps that characterize the barrel system. Therefore, by focusing on such fundamentally important processes as homeostasis and sleep within a common developmental framework, the investigations that would be supported by an RCA Award will have significant consequences for our understanding of normal and abnormal development.