Project description
Looking to the naked mole-rat to understand social communication and brain networks
Humans are good at communicating via vocal cues, for example by using variations in the sound of the voice. Yet humans are not alone in using vocalizations to share information. Many types of acoustic communication are found throughout the animal kingdom. The EU-funded SOFTCHIRP project aims to shed light on how social information encoded in acoustic signals is decoded within brain networks. To do this, the project will study vocal communication in the naked mole-rat. This animal is one of the only two eusocial mammals, making it a promising yet unexplored model for investigating the evolution of neural circuits for vocal communication, sociality and language.
Objective
The main objective of this proposal is to understand how vocal communication is used to organize social groups and in turn how brain circuits have evolved to process social information encoded in vocal cues. The naked mole-rat, as one of only two eusocial mammals, is especially well-suited to this research question. Naked mole-rats form highly cooperative social units and like bees, wasps, and ants, live in multigenerational colonies under the control of a single breeding female, queen. In addition to their extreme cooperativity, these rodents are highly vocal with a repertoire (greater than 25 distinct vocalizations) comparable to that of non-human primates. I recently identified that naked mole-rat greeting calls, soft chirps, encode information about individual identity and are modulated to create distinct colony-specific dialects. Vocal dialects can be learned early in life and are influenced by social cues (i.e. the presence or absence of the queen). These features position the naked mole-rat as a promising, yet unexplored model for investigating the evolution of neural circuits for vocal communication, sociality and language. I will employ a combination of behavioral, computational, electrophysiological, molecular and in vivo imaging tools to investigate how: (i) social identity is encoded at the earliest stages of auditory processing within the naked mole-rat brain, (ii) how neural circuits for vocal production are shaped by auditory environments during development and finally (iii) how social interactions acting through transcriptomic and molecular mechanisms influence vocal behaviors. This work has the potential to not only expand our understanding of the neural architecture underling the sensory coding and production of vocalizations, but also to provide insights into complex social behaviors such as empathy and altruism.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
80539 Munchen
Germany