Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

Brancucci, Alfredo; Lucci, Giuliana; Mazzatenta, Andrea; Tommasi, Luca

doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0279

Cited by 106 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 258 publications

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“…Crucially, our study involves the retrieval of information about genuine social partners associated with long-term relationships rather than responding to arbitrary voice-face pairs learnt in laboratory-based studies. Moreover, although the right hemisphere is involved in the processing of faces, it is widely accepted that the left hemisphere is involved in the categorization of other familiar objects and in matching with sample tasks [14,36,40]. In our study, horses were presented with the sight of the whole body of their owners, and thus may not have been using the face to assign identity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses ( Equus caballus ) extends to familiar humans

2012

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It has recently been shown that some non-human animals can cross-modally recognize members of their own taxon. What is unclear is just how plastic this recognition system can be. In this study, we investigate whether an animal, the domestic horse, is capable of spontaneous cross-modal recognition of individuals from a morphologically very different species. We also provide the first insights into how cross-modal identity information is processed by examining whether there are hemispheric biases in this important social skill. In our preferential looking paradigm, subjects were presented with two people and playbacks of their voices to determine whether they were able to match the voice with the person. When presented with familiar handlers subjects could match the specific familiar person with the correct familiar voice. Horses were significantly better at performing the matching task when the congruent person was standing on their right, indicating marked hemispheric specialization (left hemisphere bias) in this ability. These results are the first to demonstrate that cross-modal recognition in animals can extend to individuals from phylogenetically very distant species. They also indicate that processes governed by the left hemisphere are central to the cross-modal matching of visual and auditory information from familiar individuals in a naturalistic setting.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses ( Equus caballus ) extends to familiar humans

2012

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“…However, in the majority of subjects, the direction of trunk movements was inconsistent between the two contacts. Although many aspects of mammalian social behaviour are lateralized at the population level (Brancucci et al, 2009;Rosa Salva et al, 2009), the absence of population-level lateralization in elephants' trunk-to-mouth contacts, is not exceptional. Chimpanzees (Prieur et al, 2016a), gorillas (Prieur et al, 2016b) and orangutans (Rogers and Kaplan, 1996) show no population-level hand preference when touching conspecifics.…”

Section: Animal Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Horses, for instance, preferentially use the right nostril to sniff social odors such as of stallion's feces (McGreevy & Rogers, 2005) and urine of an oestrous mare (Siniscalchi et al, 2015). If the right-sided bias in socio-sexual elephants' behaviour is linked to lateralized olfactory perception, it corresponds to the general pattern of social lateraliza- tion in mammals (Brancucci et al, 2009;Rosa Salva et al, 2009;Rogers et al, 2013). At the same time, the impact of other sensory modalities besides olfaction on the origination of the revealed lateralization cannot be excluded.…”

Section: Animal Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants

Giljov

Silva

Karenina

2017

BioComm

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Asymmetrical trunk use in elephants represents a distinctive example of motor lateralization. Previous studies have shown that trunk movements in the elephant behaviour associated with feeding is lateralized at the individual, but not the population level. The manifestation of lateralized behaviour depends on the nature of the behaviour and is usually more pronounced in social context. Therefore, we hypothesized that population-level lateralization of trunk use in elephants is manifested in social behaviour. One-sided biases in trunk movements were assessed in wild individually-identified Asian elephants during feeding (tearing off a tuft of grass) and social interactions (trunk-to-mouth contacts and trunk-to-genitals contacts between male initiator and female recipient). In feeding, lateralization at the individual and population levels was estimated based on 50 lateral trunk uses per individual. In social interactions, only the population-level bias was assessed using a single trunk contact from each individual. For trunk movements during feeding, elephants showed robust individual preferences, but no population-level lateralization. The distribution of right-and left-trunkers in the present study did not differ significantly from that obtained in previous studies of both the same elephant population and geographically distinct population. No population-level bias in trunk movements during trunk-to-mouth contacts was revealed. In trunk-to-genitals contacts, in contrast, a population-level lateralization was found. Right-sided trunk movements prevailed in males touching females. While individual preferences for feeding, combined with the absence of one-sided population bias, is obviously a species-typical characteristic of Asian elephants, social behaviour, such as male-female socio-sexual contacts, can elicit population-level lateralization of trunk use in this species. The right-sided bias in trunk-to-genitals contacts may reflect lateralization of olfactory perception. If this is the case, the revealed lateralization indicates a right-hemispheric advantage in the processing of social information which is consistent with the general tendency in mammals.

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“…Figure 3.8). Interestingly, the regions selected by RVR were primarily rightlateralized, which follows previous work suggesting hemispheric asymmetries in social perception-specifically, that non-verbal social cues are dominantly processed in the right hemisphere 197 .…”

Section: Motor (Dual Rvrsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…Perhaps more interesting was the strongly right-lateralized effect observed in the visual association network. In general, higher-order visual areas in the right hemisphere are thought to support processing of nonverbal social cues 197 . Previous work has also associated OXTR polymorphisms with differential activity in lateral occipital cortex during emotional face processing 203 , and we have further shown that lateral occipital activity covaries with methylation on CpG site -934 when viewing emotional faces 100 .…”

Section: Oxytocin Social Perception and Predictive Codingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social (Neural) Network: Towards a Unifying Endophenotype Between Genes and Behavior

Santander

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The human brain is a hierarchical system where molecular, cellular, and corticallevel components interact to produce myriad mental states. Thus, brain networks can broadly be characterized in a hierarchical fashion, such that macroscale cortical functions result from accumulated microscale events ranging from the cellular to the molecular levels. However, modern neuroimaging techniques are limited in the extent to which they can resolve these interactions. In the following set of experiments, we employ a combination of imaging epigenetics and statistical machine learning techniques to decode individual differences in epigenetic makeup from multiple modalities of macroscale brain network data. A convenient target for this approach is the oxytocin system, which is modulated by epigenetic modifications to the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). Differential levels of DNA methylation in OXTR are thought to have downstream effects on both social behavioral phenotypes and the development of neural networks supporting such behaviors. Using data obtained from a large sample of healthy young adults, we describe: 1) The identification of epigenetic fingerprints in macroscale neural network architecture;2) Spatially-heterogenous relationships between epigenetic factors and spontaneous BOLD dynamics; and 3) An entropy-based model that links epigenotypes and behavioral phenotypes through patterned network dynamics. Our approach offers both novel applications of previously-existing techniques and new tools for quantifying dynamics in functional brain networks. Together, these methods have the potential to illuminate complex interactions across multiple levels of brain systems in numerous contexts, from social behavior and beyond.

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Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

Cited by 106 publications

References 258 publications

Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses ( Equus caballus ) extends to familiar humans

Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses ( Equus caballus ) extends to familiar humans

Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants

The Social (Neural) Network: Towards a Unifying Endophenotype Between Genes and Behavior

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