ERC Advanced Grant for the project "Predisposed mechanisms for social orienting: A comparative neuro-cognitive approach"

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded 2.3-million Euros to fund research being conducted by ethologist and neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of the University of Trento.

Professor Vallortigara is a specialist in animal cognition and brain lateralization; he is deputy director of CIMeC.
The title of the project is “Predisposed mechanisms for social orienting: A comparative neuro-cognitive approach”.  About seven new researchers will join Vallortigara’s lab in the next five years to develop a detailed animal model of vertebrate social predispositions using the domestic chick, relating this work to equivalent behavioural and neural measures in human newborns including those at risk of autism, for which there is no widely accepted animal model.

Why chicks? Chicks are a precocial species, meaning that they are physically mature enough to be tested as soon they hatch; moreover, because they do not need parental care to survive in a laboratory setting, their rearing experience can be carefully controlled. Furthermore, chicks are especially interesting for studying social predispositions because they engage in social imprinting immediately upon hatching.
While there is a large phylogenetic distance between the domestic chick and the human newborn, “it should be stressed that the choice of a successful animal system model in biology is not based on phylogenetic relatedness, but on the nature of problem under investigation (otherwise fruit fly genetics would be totally irrelevant to human genetics)” states Giorgio Vallortigara. “The domestic chick is a very interesting model system for investigation of the biological mechanisms underlying predispositions to attend to animate objects in human cognition.” 

The predisposition for newly hatched/born vertebrates, including humans, to attend to and preferentially learn about conspecifics is pervasive and can be of vital biological importance. The nature of the mechanisms underlying such predispositions is, however, very poorly understood. Studying them, and their physiological, genetic, molecular and neural bases, is crucial for an understanding of typical and atypical human development. Indeed, some have suggested that lack of such predispositions may contribute to autism.

The funding provided by the European will allow the researchers with to conduct parallel studies of social predispositions in chicks and human newborns at both behavioural and neural levels, including the use of NIRS (near infrared spectrography) techniques with infants

ERCs at CIMeC
The ERC Advanced Grant received by professor Vallortigara is the first one of its kind at CIMeC; however,  in the past two years, three young researchers were awarded ERC Starting Grants (CIMeC Website)