| NSF Org: |
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 31, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 11, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1328567 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Antoinette WinklerPrins
anwinkle@nsf.gov (703)292-7266 SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2014 |
| End Date: | January 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $349,352.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $355,112.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2016 = $5,760.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
201 DOWMAN DR NE ATLANTA GA US 30322-1061 (404)727-2503 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
1557 Dickey Drive Atlanta GA US 30322-1003 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Perception, Action & Cognition, Interdiscp Behav&SocSci IBSS |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
This interdisciplinary research project will examine how language and technology, two defining human characteristics, are related to one another. The project will place emphasis on the development of human technology from early evolutionary transitions, such as stone tool-making and expansions of diets and habitats, to more recent transformations, such as agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions, in order to enhance basic understanding of these patterns of ever accelerating change, including the origins of language. The investigators will test the hypothesis that language is a special case of a more general capacity for complex, hierarchically structured, goal-oriented behavior evident in technology by integrating archaeological and neuroscience methods to investigate possible functional, anatomical, and evolutionary connections between language and tool-making. By investigating possible neural overlap between language and tool-making, the project will test major evolutionary hypotheses and promote integration between neuroscience and anthropology by developing new and broadly applicable methods for studying complex, naturalistic behavior. This project will pursue the hypothesis that hierarchical structure is a unifying principle in human cognition, crossing behavioral domains that are traditionally conceived as distinct. Project findings will have the potential to powerfully impact perceptions of the nature and origins of human intelligence.
To address questions regarding how language and technology are related to each other, this project will focus on the evolutionarily relevant, archaeologically visible behavior of stone tool-making. Louis Leakey commented that stone tools represent a form of "fossilised behavior" that can be used to make inferences about the evolution of human dexterity, cognition, and cultural transmission processes. The Early Stone Age accounts for roughly 90 percent of human prehistory, covering a time period from roughly 2.6 million years to 250,000 years before the present. The development of stone tools encompassed a technological progression from simple stone chips to skillfully shaped tools as well as a nearly three-fold increase in brain size. It is likely that many distinctive aspects of modern human brain structure and function evolved during this period. In order to study this proto-typical human technology using the modern methods of neuroscience, the investigators will teach experimental subjects to make Paleolithic tools. Cognitive, behavioral, and neurophysiological aspects of the learning process will be investigated using functional brain imaging, eye-tracking, the annotation and analysis of video-recorded tool-making action sequences, and archaeological analyses of the actual tools produced. Drawing on formal language theory, the researchers will develop new methods for describing the syntactic structure of these natural action sequences and for measuring their hierarchical complexity. Manual parsing of action sequences by expert observers will be compared with the data-driven segmentation of action streams based on the eye-movement patterns of research subjects in order to produce a robust consensus. These methods of "action syntax" analysis will be generalizable to other complex behaviors and will enable the direct comparison of hierarchical structure, information processing, and brain function across linguistic (story listening) and tool-making (action observation) behaviors in this study. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Distinctive human behaviors from tool-making to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved capacity for hierarchical action sequencing – whether stinging words together to form a sentence or skilled manual actions together to make a tool. Unfortunately, testing of this idea has been hampered by a lack of methods for measuring and comparing the underlying structural complexity of such diverse real-world human behaviors. Our project addressed this issue by developing computational methods for “action parsing” and applying them in brain imaging studies of tool-making and language comprehension. These new methods allowed us to describe strings of actions and of words in exactly the same way, and to make “incremental processing” predictions of the brain responses to stimulus complexity. Combining the methods of Archaeology and Cognitive Neuroscience, we trained participants over a period of several moths to make Paleolithic stone tools like those our ancestors relied on 500,000 years ago. By studying this prototypical human skill, we hoped to gain insight not only into modern human behavior and cognition but also their evolutionary origins. We found that brain responses to structural complexity in tool-making and language do in fact overlap in a classic “language area” of frontal cortex (“Broca’s area”). This provides support for the emerging view that human language performance is cognitively more similar to other acquired skills than previously thought and identifies a particular functional and neuroanatomical point of overlap. This finding provides new evidence for long-standing hypotheses of language-technology co-evolution that have previously been difficult to test. Specifically, it suggests that adaptation to increasing complex Paleolithic technologies may have laid the neurocognitive foundations on which the human language capacity was later constructed. Beyond these specific results, the methods we developed have broad promise for the quantification and investigation of diverse, real-world human behaviors and researchers increasingly attempt to move beyond artificial lab conditions to study neuroscience “in the wild.”
Last Modified: 06/03/2019
Modified by: Dietrich W Stout
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