Profile
Project Title: Exploring the neurobiological and cognitive basis of how perceptions of Gravity and Motion are encoded in the brains of the domestic Chick: A Study of Natural and Unnatural Trajectories
Summary: At the onset of life, animals devoid of sensory experience rely on evolutionary predispositions to determine which stimuli to approach. Previous research has demonstrated that stimuli exhibiting signs of animacy, such as face-like features and biological motion, are particularly appealing to vertebrate species. In my own research, I found that domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) can recognize upward movement against the force of gravity without prior visual experience, and they naturally attend to such stimuli.
Despite these findings, the neurobiological and cognitive basis of this predispositional encoding of the physical world remains unclear. The aim of my current research is to investigate how projectile motion is represented in the brain of the domestic chick and to explore how they perceive both natural and unnatural object trajectories.
To achieve this, I will combine behavioral experiments and learning tasks with immunohistological and electrophysiological analyses of the chick brain. This approach will allow me to assess the chicks' ability to adapt their expectations and form predictions about motion, providing insight into how prior knowledge interacts with learned experience and where this information is encoded in the brain.
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