Descrizione del progetto
Esplorare l’evoluzione del cervello per l’elaborazione degli stimoli sociali
I primati umani e non umani dipendono in larga misura dai membri della propria specie per sopravvivere. Per questo motivo, passano molto tempo a guardare il modo in cui questi si comportano per preparare risposte sociali adattive. Il progetto RELEVANCE, finanziato dall’UE, si propone di comprendere in che modo il cervello ha sviluppato strutture speciali per elaborare stimoli sociali di grande rilevanza. Altro obiettivo è anche quello di svelare come la visione sociale sostiene il comportamento adattivo. Per far questo, esplorerà l’elaborazione visiva dei corpi e delle interazioni dal punto di vista meccanico e computazionale e dimostrerà come questa elaborazione sostenga capacità superiori come la comprensione dell’intenzione, l’azione e l’emozione. Il progetto getta nuova luce sui deficit della comunicazione sociale in neuropsichiatria e propone nuove ipotesi sulle loro basi genetiche.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- social sciencespsychologycognitive psychologymental processes
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiologycognitive neuroscience
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationsvirtual reality
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputational intelligence
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-SyG - Synergy grantIstituzione ospitante
3000 Leuven
Belgio