The neural basis of early action perception

描述（由申请人提供）：推理他人行为的能力是成熟和发展认知的一个普遍方面。在过去的工作中，我通过证明婴儿对他人的目标和意图有着丰富的理解，对该领域做出了重大贡献，我已经确定了一些因素和经验，例如婴儿的发展行动能力，这些因素和经验可以解释这一领域的发展变化。我的长期职业目标是提供一个精确的，机械的婴儿和儿童对他人行为理解的变化。然而，这一目标的进展依赖于方法的发展，以评估神经认知过程的动作知觉。这项职业发展奖中提出的活动代表了使用事件相关电位（ERP）技术系统研究动作知觉神经基础的第一步。职业提升计划包括两个主要组成部分。在培训阶段，我将接受两位发展认知神经科学领域的顶尖专家的指导，并获得婴儿ERP数据采集、处理和分析方面的实践经验。在研究阶段，我将进行一项试点研究，以探讨使用ERP方法来研究典型发育中的婴儿的动作知觉的神经认知机制的可行性。这项工作的结果将提供有关早期行动感知和理解的发展机制的重要信息。重要的是，拟议的研究将通过创建一种评估婴儿动作感知和社会认知其他方面的新方法，以及将发展心理学的概念转化为神经科学，反之亦然，来推进科学知识。此外，这些拟议工作的结果可能与自闭症的诊断和补救特别相关，自闭症是一种发育障碍，其特征是在推理他人行为方面存在缺陷。 公共卫生相关性：这项研究旨在探讨婴儿对目标导向行为的感知和理解的神经认知机制。这项工作将提供有关典型认知和社会发展所涉及过程的重要信息，这些信息随后可用于自闭症等发育障碍的诊断和补救。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to reason about other's behavior is a pervasive aspect of mature and developing cognition. In past work, I have significantly contributed to the field by demonstrating that infants possess a rich understanding of others' goals and intentions, and I have identified some of the factors and experiences, such as infants' developing action abilities, that account for developmental change in this domain. My long-term career goal is to provide a precise, mechanistic account of changes in infants and children's understanding of others' behavior. However, progress toward this objective relies on the development of methods to assess the neurocognitive processes underlying action perception. The activities proposed in this career enhancement award represent the first step toward systematically investigating the neural basis of action perception, using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. The career enhancement plan involves two primary components. During the training phase I will receive mentorship from two leading experts in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, and gain hands-on experience in the acquisition, processing and analysis of infant ERP data. During the research phase, I will conduct a pilot study to investigate the feasibility of using ERP methods to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying action perception in typically developing infants. The findings from this work will provide important information regarding the developmental mechanisms underlying early action perception and understanding. Critically, the proposed studies will advance scientific knowledge by creating a novel method for assessing infants' action perception, and other aspects of social cognition, and by translating concepts from developmental psychology to neuroscience and vice versa. In addition, these results of the proposed work may be particularly relevant to the diagnosis and remediation of autism, a developmental disorder that is characterized by deficits in reasoning about other people's behavior. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed research seeks to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying infants' perception and understanding of goal-directed action. This work will provide important information regarding the processes involved in typical cognitive and social development, information that can then be used in the diagnosis and remediation of developmental disorders, such as autism.