Early social adversity modulates the relation between attention biases and socioemotional behaviour in juvenile macaques

Abstract

Affect-biased attention may play a fundamental role in early socioemotional development, but factors influencing its emergence and associations with typical versus pathological outcomes remain unclear. Here, we adopted a nonhuman primate model of early social adversity (ESA) to: (1) establish whether juvenile, pre-adolescent macaques demonstrate attention biases to both threatening and reward-related dynamic facial gestures; (2) examine the effects of early social experience on such biases; and (3) investigate how this relation may be linked to socioemotional behaviour. Two groups of juvenile macaques (ESA exposed and non-ESA exposed) were presented with pairs of dynamic facial gestures comprising two conditions: neutral-threat and neutral-lipsmacking. Attention biases to threat and lipsmacking were calculated as the proportion of gaze to the affective versus neutral gesture. Measures of anxiety and social engagement were also acquired from videos of the subjects in their everyday social environment. Results revealed that while both groups demonstrated an attention bias towards threatening facial gestures, a greater bias linked to anxiety was demonstrated by the ESA group only. Only the non-ESA group demonstrated a significant attention bias towards lipsmacking, and the degree of this positive bias was related to duration and frequency of social engagement in this group. These findings offer important insights into the effects of early social experience on affect-biased attention and related socioemotional behaviour in nonhuman primates, and demonstrate the utility of this model for future investigations into the neural and learning mechanisms underlying this relationship across development.

Visual preference for socially relevant spatial relations in humans and monkeys

“…Subjects' gaze position was manually coded offline, frame-by-frame, by a researcher (HR) blind to the position of the two dyads on the screen. This researcher had been established as reliable using this coding scheme, with very good reliability scores (ĸ = 0.84) obtained in a previous study with the same paired-stimuli presentation set-up and the same coding scheme (Rayson et al, 2021). On each video-frame, the coder decided whether the monkey looked at the right image, the left image, in an ambiguous location or in a task irrelevant location (off the display).…”

Visual Preference for Socially Relevant Spatial Relations in Humans and Monkeys

“…Subjects' gaze position was manually coded offline, frame by frame, by a researcher (H. Rayson) blind to the position of the two dyads on the screen. This researcher had been established as reliable using this coding scheme, with very good reliability scores (k = 0.84) obtained in a previous study with the same pairedstimuli presentation setup and the same coding scheme (Rayson et al, 2021). On each video frame, the coder decided whether the monkey looked at the right image, at the left image, in an ambiguous location or in a taskirrelevant location (off the display).…”

The shape of lipsmacking: socio-emotional regulation in bearded capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus)

“…According to Gallo et al ( 2022 ), to make visual information exchange effective, both parties must be attentive to the face of the other, so a correct and successful decoding and responding can occur (Gallo et al, 2022 ). In fact, an attention bias to positive stimuli, such as a happy face, can play a critical role in early socio-emotional functioning and processing (Rayson et al, 2021 ). However, our findings in combination bring into question the idea that lipsmacking is solely a face-to-face interaction (e.g.…”