INSPIRE: Dynamical Principles of Animal Movement

该INSPIRE奖部分由社会、行为和经济科学理事会行为和认知科学部的感知、行动和认知项目和语言学项目，以及生物学理事会综合有机体系统部门的动物行为项目资助。动物的活动方式千差万别，从爬行和游泳到求爱和说话。特别有趣的是，运动的背景，比如它是否具有交际功能，是否从根本上改变了协调原则。这项拟议中的研究汇集了一个由生物学家、语言学家和心理学家组成的跨学科团队，研究人类、章鱼和线虫等多种动物的运动。这项工作首次对动物物种内部和物种之间的交流和非交流行为进行了比较。跨物种的比较也有助于探索人类的象征性和离散的语言交流是如何从不断移动的舌头和手臂进化而来的。更一般地说，运动控制系统与人类语言系统一样，具有从较小的子部分创造新的功能复杂运动（或句子）的生成能力。肌肉控制在某种程度上是这种生殖能力的基础吗？包括困难语言运动和手语语言增强了这些实验的更广泛的影响。此外，秀丽隐杆线虫有望成为帕金森病中构音障碍的模型；秀丽隐杆线虫多巴胺的合成和摄取将被操纵，从而模拟帕金森病患者多巴胺信号的异常。研究人员还与南加州大学社区学术倡议合作，让当地高中的学生注意到这项研究，尤其是那些在科学领域代表性不足的少数民族学生。

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.