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 project was to investigate the biological origins of this ability, that is to examine the evolutionary foundations and neural background of human communication. Humans’ versatile ability to understand the meaning of communicative signal sequences plays a major role in the success of individuals and the adaptability of the human species, therefore, it is crucial to understand the skillset underlying this cognitive capacity even better. I, therefore, aimed to examine these issues based on my previous findings to reveal the mechanism that makes the human species unique in the animal kingdom. Since human society depends on vertical and horizontal knowledge transfer, that is, communicative information sharing, understanding the basics of human communication is highly relevant on the societal level. The answer to the question of how humans are able to communicate will have an effect on other disciplines, including the humanities (e.g. pedagogy), applied sciences (e.g. applied computer science), and basic research in other fields (e.g. neuroscience).
Our recent findings demonstrated that infants can recognize communicative information transfer even in its abstract and unfamiliar forms. However, the biological basis of this ability remained unclear, including two major questions: the proximate and ultimate causes of humans’ communicative ability. The general aim of the proposed project was to reveal what makes humans able to use their species unique capacity to communicate, understand and share information with others that allow social learning and cooperation.
In my project, I relied on the insights of Shannon’s mathematical theory of information transmission and investigated whether the unpredictability of signals that are exchanged in a turn-taking interaction would lead to specific responses that indicate the recognition of communicative information transfer. The first main objective was to investigate whether the ability to recognize communicative information transfer based on the unpredictability of signals has an evolutionary ancient origin (WP1), thus, I planned to study a non-human animal species, the domestic chicken. The second objective was to understand the neural basis of recognition of communicative information transfer in infants. I aimed to investigate this question by applying EEG (WP2-WP5). In the first part with domestic chicks, I planned to apply a well-established behavioral methodology to investigate whether the sensitivity to the structural properties of signal sequences has an ancient evolutionary origin. The two further studies I planned involved the use of cutting-edge, EEG technology with human infants to investigate the ontogenetic and neural basis of the second main research question.
