vlog faculty members Wan-chun Liu, Associate professor of psychological and brain sciences and neuroscience, and Spencer Kelly, Hurley Family Chair, professor of psychological and brain sciences, and neuroscience, have received an award for $8,344 for their project “Song-entangled beat gesture in songbirds: A window to the mind and brain.”
The project will use songbirds as animal models to explore the cognitive functions, physiological and brain mechanisms, and molecular underpinnings of co-speech gestures in humans and songbirds. The ultimate goal of this interdisciplinary research is to develop the first non-mammalian animal model for human speech-gesture study to explore the evolution and development of spoken language and co-speech gestures, which may provide novel insights into our understanding of the human (and non-human) mind and brain.