Brain, Behavior and Emergence of Cognitive Competence

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This program-project application describes continuation of research on the emergence of cognitive competence supported by NICHD-38051. It builds on the psychological principles and key questions articulated from that research, utilizing methods developed and proven there. The present application extends this research in several important new directions while also addressing questions that were generated by our previous findings. Seven projects are proposed, with research designed to elucidate the emergence of cognitive competence as it is manifest across primate species and development, and in correspondence with brain structure, activity and function. The present application benefits from substantial complementary and convergence between the projects, so that the scientific promise of the entire program greatly exceeds the sum of the anticipated scientific gains of each strong individual project. The psychological processes being investigated (attention, executive function, learning, memory, spatial problem solving, numerical cognition, categorization, motor control) are themselves closely inter-related, and the understanding of any one process dictates studying its relation to the other constructs as well as how each process is altered by the availability of language. The synthesis of these projects, administrative support for this team of investigators, care of the nonhuman primates, maintenance of laboratory resources, and neuroimaging scans will benefit all of the investigations in this program-project, and thus are proposed as core costs. This ensures that the ambitious program of research will be conducted in an efficient and integrative way, using our unique and limited animal resources to yield the greatest scientific gains. We anticipate that the findings from these applications will generate educational and clinical applications, as well as informing theory on learning, language, and cognition from a broad comparative, developmental, and neuropsychological perspective.