Vocal and locomotor coordination develops in association with arousal state
Abstract
In adult animals, movement and vocalizations are coordinated, sometimes facilitating, and at other times inhibiting, each other. What is missing is how these different domains of motor control become coordinated over the course of development. We investigated how postural-locomotor behaviors may influence vocal development, and the role played by physiological arousal during their interactions. Using infant marmoset monkeys, we densely sampled vocal, postural and locomotor behaviors and estimated arousal fluctuations from electrocardiographic measures of heart rate. We found that vocalizations matured sooner than postural and locomotor skills, and that vocal-locomotor coordination improved with age and during elevated arousal levels. These results suggest that postural-locomotor maturity is not required for vocal development to occur, and that infants gradually improve coordination between vocalizations and body movement through a process that may be facilitated by arousal level changes.
Data availability
We have uploaded our data to Dryad (doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cp75158).
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Data from: Vocal and locomotor coordination develops in association with arousal stateDryad Digital Repository, doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cp75158.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health
- Morgan L Gustison
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
- Asif A Ghazanfar
National Science Foundation
- Jeremy I Borjon
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#1908-18) of Princeton University.
Copyright
© 2019, Gustison et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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