MCA: Neural control of elaborate gestural displays

Many animals, including humans, communicate using elaborate gestures and body movements. Indeed, such behavior can mediate interactions related to courtship, competition, parenting, cooperation, feeding, and even predatory defense. However, despite the importance of this behavior to survival and reproductive success, as well as its ubiquity in animals, very little is understood about its mechanistic basis.

This gap is perhaps largest with respect to the brain. The current project will provide the investigator with training in cutting-edge neuroscience technology that will test how particular brain regions contribute to the production of specialized gestural movements that mediate communication between individuals. The work itself will involve woodpeckers, which readily drum their beaks on trees to notify others of their territory in an attempt to maintain access to important breeding resources.

Training that the investigator receives will greatly enhance his research program by allowing him to address a set of novel questions about how brain-level control of behavior is used for communication. Such skills will also elevate the investigator’s ability to train future scientists (e.g., undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students) who are interested in exploring more about how the brain controls social behavior.

More broadly, this project includes plans to support the development of STEM educational programming for limited English proficiency (LEP) high school students in the Rhode Island school system.

Gesture and body movement are critical components of animal communication in a diverse range of taxa, yet little is known about how the brain controls such behavior. This project aims to uncover the neural basis of gestural communication, both in terms of gestural production and perception. To do this work, the investigator will receive rigorous training in cutting-edge neural electrophysiology techniques so that brain activity can be recorded in freely displaying animals, as well as animals that perceive such displays.

The focal species will be downy woodpeckers, as these birds compete for territories by rapidly jackhammering their bills on trees in the environment. This is one of the most extreme gestural displays on the planet, and thus these birds make an excellent model to pioneer studies that explore how the brain controls this incredible behavior. Accordingly, this research will provide one of the first explorations of the forebrain system that controls discrete movements to facilitate drumming displays.

This study will also compare the control of these movements to other non-communicative movements, such as basic locomotion or foraging. Finally, this research will work to establish how perceptual systems in the nervous system facilitate the appraisal of drumming. The auditory forebrain will be the focal point of perception experiments, and this work will provide a first look at how gesture-based displays might be assessed aurally by the brain.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.