Projektbeschreibung
Erforschung der Gehirnentwicklung zur Verarbeitung sozialer Reize
Menschliche und nichtmenschliche Primaten hängen beim Überleben stark von Mitgliedern ihrer eigenen Spezies ab. Daher beobachten sie lange das Verhalten dieser Mitglieder, um adaptive soziale Reaktionen vorzubereiten. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt RELEVANCE soll Einblicke in die Entwicklung spezieller Strukturen im Gehirn geben, welche hochrelevante soziale Reize verarbeiten. Es soll auch zeigen, wie soziale Vision adaptives Verhalten unterstützt. Dafür wird das Projekt die visuelle Verarbeitung von Körpern sowie Interaktionen mechanistisch und rechnerisch untersuchen. Außerdem wird es zeigen, wie diese Verarbeitung höhere Fähigkeiten wie das Verstehen von Absichten, Handlungen und Gefühlen unterstützt. Das Projekt wird ein neues Licht auf soziale Kommunikationsdefizite in der Neuropsychiatrie werfen und neue Hypothesen über ihre genetische Grundlage vorschlagen.
Ziel
Social species, and specifically human and nonhuman primates, rely heavily on conspecifics for survival. Considerable time is spent watching each other’s behavior because this is often the most relevant source of information for preparing adaptive social responses. The project RELEVANCE aims to understand how the brain evolved special structures to process highly relevant social stimuli like bodies and to reveal how social vision sustains adaptive behaviour.
This requires a novel way of thinking about biological information processing, currently among the brains’ most distinctive and least understood characteristic that accounts for the biggest difference between brains and computers.
The project will develop a mechanistic and computational understanding of the visual processing of bodies and interactions and show how this processing sustains higher abilities such as understanding intention, action and emotion. Relevance will accomplish this by integrating advanced methods from multiple disciplines: psychophysics and high-field functional imaging in combination with virtual reality and neural stimulation in humans; electrophysiology with optogenetics and laminar recordings in monkeys.
Crosstalk between
human and monkey methods will establish homologies between the species, revealing cornerstones of the theory. In a radical departure from current practice, we will develop novel deep neural network models that unify the data. These models will not only capture detailed mechanisms of neural processing of complex social stimuli and its dynamics, but also reproduce the modulation of brain activity during active behavior.
RELEVANCE will reveal novel ways of understanding and diagnosing social communication deficits in neuropsychiatry, and suggest novel hypotheses about their genetic basis. It will motivate novel principles and architectures for processing of socially relevant information in computer and robotic systems.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
- social sciencespsychologycognitive psychologymental processes
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiologycognitive neuroscience
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationsvirtual reality
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputational intelligence
Schlüsselbegriffe
Programm/Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
ERC-SyG - Synergy grantGastgebende Einrichtung
3000 Leuven
Belgien