Homeostasis and behavioral state organization in infants

描述（由申请人提供）：研究职业奖将支持正在进行的NIH资助的婴儿大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。这些调查导致了大量的重新解释的体温调节能力的婴儿在寒冷的挑战和体温调节和心血管功能之间的重要联系。随着这些研究在过去十年中的进展，申请人已经使用睡眠/觉醒活动作为体温调节能力的许多量度之一。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，尽管它在婴儿哺乳动物中无处不在，但仍然受到相对较少的实验和理论关注。因此，睡眠的研究已经成为申请人实验室中越来越重要的焦点，并且他已经开发了从独特的发育角度研究婴儿睡眠的新方法和概念。RCA奖将促进申请人的能力，以推进一项研究计划，以解决神经基板和功能的主动睡眠在婴儿大鼠。申请人建议基于其实验室的最近研究，使用各种方法学途径系统地检查主动睡眠的发展（例如，损伤、神经记录）。这个建议所采用的发展框架与其他研究者所采用的不同之处在于，它并不以成人标准来判断婴儿睡眠（这一主题指导了他对婴儿体内稳态的其他研究），而是试图理解随着睡眠的发展而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一个理想的模型，为了解行为状态组织的神经过程的婴儿大鼠。第二个目的，这部分的建议是整合胡须活动作为一个额外的组成部分，在婴儿大鼠的主动睡眠和开发的胡须桶系统作为一个模型系统，用于研究的作用，睡眠相关的自发活动的地形图的发展，特点桶系统。因此，通过在一个共同的发展框架内关注内稳态和睡眠等根本性的重要过程，RCA奖支持的研究将对我们理解正常和异常发展产生重大影响。

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.