Description du projet
Étudier la façon dont le cerveau a évolué pour traiter les stimuli sociaux
Les primates humains et non humains dépendent fortement de leurs congénères pour survivre. C’est pour cela qu’ils passent beaucoup de temps à observer le comportement de leurs semblables afin de préparer des réponses sociales adaptatives. Le projet RELEVANCE, financé par l’UE, a l’intention de comprendre comment le cerveau a développé des structures spéciales pour traiter les stimuli sociaux de grande importance. Il entend également montrer comment la vision sociale est à la base du comportement adaptatif. Pour y parvenir, il se penchera sur le traitement visuel des corps et des interactions de manière mécanique et informatique, et démontrera comment ce traitement est à la base d’aptitudes supérieures comme la compréhension des intentions, des actions et des émotions. Le projet apportera un nouvel éclairage sur les déficits de communication sociale en neuropsychiatrie et proposera de nouvelles hypothèses concernant leur base génétique.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
- social sciencespsychologycognitive psychologymental processes
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiologycognitive neuroscience
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationsvirtual reality
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputational intelligence
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-SyG - Synergy grantInstitution d’accueil
3000 Leuven
Belgique