This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Perception, Action, and Cognition Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and the Robust Intelligence Program in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering.
This research will address and bridge two grand challenges: (1) To understand how action, perception, and social interaction were supported by the brain of the last common ancestor of macaque and human, complementing modeling elsewhere on great apes, and (2) To build on evolutionary insights to better understand how different parts of the human brain work together when we use language. Key entry points will be signed and spoken languages and the use of hand gestures (e.g., novel hand gestures by apes) to convey meaning. Going further, a particular focus will be on systems that link the brain's capacities to generate as well as recognize actions, and their interactions with other brain systems.
An international group of scientists in linguistics, primatology, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurocomputational modeling of motor, cognitive and language processes will pool data on the anatomy, physiology, behavior and communication of the various primate species. To support this extended collaboration, the researchers will build a novel online collaborative environment ("Collaboratory Workspaces") to test, make predictions, and challenge both the modeling and experimentation. This infrastructure may catalyze a new style of collaboration between modelers, experimentalists, and clinicians.
The research also has the potential to support modeling of the damage that results in the clinical disorders of apraxia and aphasia. Integration of models of vision, action and language is also important for creating robots that can flexibly and usefully interact with individual people and for "neuromorphic architecture," in which a building's sensors and action systems adaptively adjust to the human inhabitants.
