This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project is supported by the Science, Technology and Society program. Its goal is to develop a conceptual reorientation of certain aspects of the evolution of communication. Central to that reorientation is a close study of a type of behavior which binds humans together with non-human species; namely, expressive behavior.
The researchers maintain that expressive behavior does more than convey information about an animal's emotion; it also points to aspects of the animal's environment and has the biological function of eliciting appropriate audience responses. Creatures capable of such behavior can engage in a distinctive form of communication, expressive communication, which has the following characteristics. It represents a object or situation in the world, shows an affective or cognitive state of the communicator, and elicits (via emotional contagion or empathy) an appropriate response to that object or situation in a suitably attuned observer. These characteristics equip it to play a key role in the lives of social creatures, whose survival depends on success in coordinating action. Thus, properly analyzed, expressive communication emerges as a lynchpin of social life, both in humans and in monkeys, great apes, canids, and most likely many cetaceans. The researchers will argue that expressive communication also emerges as a crucial but under-theorized stage in the evolutionary path to linguistic communication as it is found in our own species.
Research for this project will use tools from evolutionary game theory, findings from ethology, and conceptual analyses offered by philosophers of language and mind. The researchers will organize a series of interdisciplinary workshops focused on themes related to expressive behavior and communication culminating in a published volume of essays related to this topic and/or a series of independent journal articles. The result will be an enriched understanding of the origins of one of our own species' crowning achievements, linguistic communication.
