Homeostasis and behavioral state organization in infants

描述(由申请者提供)：研究事业奖将支持NIH资助的正在进行的关于幼鼠基本生物行为过程的研究，特别是关于行为的研究]以及体温调节和心血管稳态的生理机制。这些研究导致对婴儿在寒冷挑战期间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的进展，申请人将睡眠/清醒活动作为体温调节能力的许多衡量标准之一。这些研究自然引出了有关积极睡眠的现象学和功能的问题，尽管它在幼年哺乳动物中随处可见，但在实验和理论上仍然相对较少受到关注。因此，睡眠研究在申请人的实验室中变得越来越重要，他从独特的发展角度开发了研究婴儿睡眠的新方法和概念。RCA奖将培养申请者推进一项研究计划的能力，该计划旨在解决幼年大鼠积极睡眠的神经基础和功能。申请人建议在他的实验室最近的研究基础上，使用各种方法(例如，损伤、神经记录)系统地检查活动睡眠的发展。这项建议中采用的发展框架与其他研究人员采用的不同之处在于，它不会以成人标准来评判婴儿的睡眠(这一主题指导了他对婴儿体内平衡的其他研究)，而是试图理解随着睡眠随着发育时间的推移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年大鼠作为理解行为状态组织潜在的神经过程的理想模型。该提案这一部分的第二个目标是将胡须活动作为幼年大鼠积极睡眠的一个额外组成部分，并开发胡须桶系统作为一个模式系统，以检查与睡眠相关的自发活动在绘制表征桶系统的地形图方面的作用。因此，通过在一个共同的发展框架内关注动态平衡和睡眠等根本重要的过程，由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.