Social agent identity cells in the prefrontal cortex of interacting groups of primates

Abstract

A mind’s-eye view of others Social interaction among groups of individuals is a complex proposition. Not only must an animal keep track of various vocalizations and direct interactions in the present but likely also their knowledge of every other individual and their history of interaction with that individual. Two papers begin to unravel the neuronal process by which such complexities are managed (see the Perspective by Sliwa). Báez-Mendoza et al . tracked the interactional dynamics among three Rhesus macaques and found that neurons in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex represent details of the interaction, such as identity, context, and interaction history. Rose et al . remotely recorded from freely interacting Egyptian fruit bats and similarly found coordinated neural activity among individuals, a relationship between brain activity patterns and social preference, and that single neurons in the prefrontal cortex distinguished between the vocalizations of specific individuals. Together these papers reveal clear evidence for neuronal encoding of social interaction and identity. —SNV

Neural activation associated with outgroup helping in adolescent rats

“…In addition, neuronal ensembles in the medial amygdala show sensitivity to conspecific sex in adult but not adolescent mice ( Yao et al., 2017 ; Bergan et al., 2014 ). The mouse hypothalamus integrates information about conspecific sex and reproductive state ( Kohl et al., 2018 ), and the dmPFC has been shown to respond to conspecific sex in mice ( Kingsbury et al., 2020 ) and primates ( Baez-Mendoza et al., 2021 ). Here, many of these same motivational regions were sensitive to group identity information, perhaps indicating that they contributed to the observed behavior.…”

Cortical Face-Selective Responses Emerge Early in Human Infancy

“…Under this framework, seeing engaging human faces, hearing self-relevant voices, and pro-social touch would activate infants' reward network, resulting in increased attention to socially relevant stimuli. In support of this hypothesis, infant STS responds to social perception in the auditory [79,91,109,110], visual [74,76,90,91], and tactile [111] domains while MPFC is part of the reward network [112][113][114][115] and responds to socially self-relevant environmental cues in infants [79,81,82,[106][107][108]. In infants, affective touch enhances infants' attention to faces [116] and increases functional coupling between STS and MPFC [117], while auditory language modulates activity in STS and MPFC [110,118].…”

Multimodal cues displayed by submissive rats promote prosocial choices by dominants

“…This highlights the importance of embracing the complexity of social interactions by expanding their analysis to more quantitative and sophisticated venues and taking into account the contribution of each individual to the joint social interaction. This is still scarce in mechanistic studies regarding the neural circuits of social behaviour, with some recent notable exceptions 23,59,[63][64][65][66] , and invite us to adopt a more complex approach in the study of social behaviour going beyond the standard measurement of direct social investigation of one of the interacting individuals.…”