Project description
The ABCs of human communication
The ability to share information with others distinguishes humans from non-human primates. This is what makes the human species unique. The EU-funded RoCS project will explore the biological basis for this ability. Specifically, it will reveal the evolutionary foundations and the neural underpinnings. The findings will shed light on whether a non-human animal species can recognise and prefer acoustic signals that are indicative of communicative information transfer in domestic chicks. The project will conduct two EEG experiments with human infants to find specific neural markers of communication and to prove that communication can elicit high-level inferences about agency.
Objective
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.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
38122 Trento
Italy