In order to understand ecologically meaningful social behaviors and their neural substrates in humans and other animals, researchers have been using a variety of social stimuli in the laboratory with a goal of extracting specific processes in real-life scenarios. However, certain stimuli may not be sufficiently effective at evoking typical social behaviors and neural responses. Here, we review empirical research employing different types of social stimuli by classifying them into five levels of naturalism. We describe the advantages and limitations while providing selected example studies for each level. We emphasize the important trade-off between experimental control and ecological validity across the five levels of naturalism. Taking advantage of newly emerging tools, such as real-time videos, virtual avatars, and wireless neural sampling techniques, researchers are now more than ever able to adopt social stimuli at a higher level of naturalism to better capture the dynamics and contingency of real-life social interaction.
How we value our own rewards depends on what others have. A new study shows that neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex selectively monitor the value of rewards received by oneself or by another individual, whereas midbrain dopaminergic neurons integrate these values to generate social subjective reward values. Main BodyYou've just been awarded a grant that offers you significant funding for 3 years. Then you find out that your colleague has received far greater funding for 5 years. It is only natural that your own grant now seems much less satisfying. We constantly update our own reward-valuation system through social comparison, a feature shared among primates 1 . How does the brain calculate reward values based on what others have? A new study in this issue of Nature Neuroscience demonstrates that neurons in the primate prefrontal cortex monitor the value of rewards received either by oneself or by another individual, whereas midbrain dopaminergic neurons integrate this information to generate 'subjective' value.The primate prefrontal cortex has been implicated in representing individual-specific (or agent-specific) social information. Neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex encode actions performed by oneself or by the partner during human-monkey interactions 2 . Furthermore, a large number of neurons located in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encode correct and erroneous actions of a partner monkey during a task in which the partner's actions and outcomes must be monitored to maximize one's own reward 3,4 . In another task where monkeys chose to donate or withhold rewards from a conspecific, neurons in the rostral anterior cingulate gyrus of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) represented reward outcome information in an agentspecific manner, including neurons that encoded reward allocations to the other monkey exclusively 5 . The importance of the midline frontal areas in social decision-making was further corroborated by a study showing the causal contribution of anterior cingulate cortex neurons in promoting cooperative decisions during a prisoner's dilemma game in monkeys 6 . Although these studies indicated that the mPFC processes agent specific information, it remained to be determined whether and how mPFC neurons discriminate changing reward values assigned to self and others.In addition to prefrontal cortex, subcortical structures play a central role in signaling reward value. In nonsocial contexts, a subset of midbrain dopaminergic neurons is involved in calculating value-related predictions, including reward value 7,8 . In social contexts, dopaminerelease patterns from the rat nucleus accumbens, which receives major projections from midbrain dopaminergic neurons, are modulated by reward delivery to a conspecific 9 . However, whether the firing rates of midbrain dopaminergic neurons themselves encode reward value in social contexts had remained unclear. One exciting hypothesis is that the dopaminergic cells in the midbrain derive social subjective value by integrating agent-specific information ...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.