Descripción del proyecto
El abecé de la comunicación humana
La habilidad de compartir información con otros distingue al ser humano de los demás primates. Es lo que hace única a la especie humana. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos RoCS estudiará la base biológica de esta habilidad. Concretamente, revelará los fundamentos evolutivos y las bases neurológicas. Los hallazgos arrojarán luz sobre si una especie animal no humana puede reconocer y preferir señales acústicas que sean indicativas de una transferencia comunicativa de información en los pollos domésticos. El proyecto llevará a cabo dos experimentos de electroencefalografía con niños humanos para hallar marcadores neuronales específicos de la comunicación y para probar que la comunicación puede provocar interferencias de alto nivel en las acciones.
Objetivo
The ability of the human species to share information with others is unique due to the fascinating expressivity of human communicative actions. The primary aim of the present proposal is to investigate the biological basis of this ability to reveal 1) the evolutionary foundations and 2) the neural underpinnings of it, which makes humans able to understand the meaning of communicative signal sequences.
To test the first question, I will investigate whether a non-human animal species can recognize and prefer acoustic signals that are indicative of communicative information transfer in domestic chicks. To examine the second question, I will conduct two EEG experiments with young human infants to find specific neural markers of communication and to prove that communication can elicit high-level inferences about agency. In all experiments, I will rely on my recent results published in high-ranked, multidisciplinary journals, which show that the variability of signal sequences in turn-taking interactions is interpreted by human infants as indicative of communicative information transfer – even if the signals and the communicators are unfamiliar to them.
The Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences and the supervision of Professor Vallortigara offers the perfect infrastructure and professional background to investigate both the comparative and the psychophysiological questions of the proposed project at the same time. Thus, the examination of the neural underpinnings of the sensitivity to communicative information transfer and the evolutionary ancient cognitive mechanisms behind it will enable to understand the biological foundations of human communication, which is not possible without testing non-linguistic and pre-linguistic participants. The findings of the present proposal can be highly relevant in cognitive and comparative psychology, linguistics and pragmatics and in applied sciences such as natural language processing, pedagogy or communication studies.
Ámbito científico
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Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinador
38122 Trento
Italia