Oxytocin facilitates communicative adjustments by upregulating broadband aperiodic activity in the prefrontal cortex

Abstract

Oxytocin modulates various social behaviors. In humans, oxytocin has been shown to modulate recipient design, i.e. how communicators adjust to their presumed mutual knowledge. Here, we investigate electrophysiological correlates of the oxytocinergic modulation of recipient design. Fifty-one males were randomly assigned to receive double-blind intranasal administration of oxytocin or placebo. While acquiring magnetoencephalography, the participants engaged in a live communicative task with two different addressees, a child and an adult. Unbeknownst to the participants, a confederate played the role of both addressees, with matched communicative behaviors. All participants started the task by putting more emphasis on their communicative behaviors when they thought to be interacting with the child addressee. As the communication progressed, the oxytocin group reduced variability in their communicative adjustments, adapting more effectively than the placebo group to the matched communicative behavior of the addressees. The magnitude of this oxytocin-related dynamic communicative adjustment was proportional to increased broadband aperiodic power, an index of local synaptic activity, in the right prefrontal-temporal circuit. These findings indicate that oxytocin facilitates dynamic adjustments in recipient design by enhancing cortical signal-to-noise in a portion of the same cortical circuit known to support the production of novel communicative behaviors.

Integrating stereotypes and factual evidence in interpersonal communication

“…For the independent sample, structural images were acquired with a 1.5T Siemens Avanto scanner using a single-shot MPRAGE sequence (TR/TE, 1.73 s/2.95 ms; voxel size, 1 x 1 x 1 mm 3 ; FOV, 256 mm). This dataset consisted of the placebo group of a study on the effects of intranasal oxytocin administration on communicative adjustment 8,73 . We applied the same voxel-based morphometry pipeline as used in the main analysis to both datasets, and extracted right ACCg volume using a statistical mask based on the findings reported in the main text.…”

“…For the participants at age 14, we correlated right ACCg volume with communicative adjustment at age 17. For the independent sample, we correlated right ACCg volume with communicative adjustment during partner transition 6 through 8, when adjustment was statistically prominent 83 . As shown in Fig.…”