Two functions of the primate amygdala in social gaze

Widespread implementations of interactive social gaze neurons in the primate prefrontal-amygdala networks

“…Continuously monitoring the gaze of oneself and other is essential for social gaze interaction. To our knowledge, there is only one study so far that reported neural tracking of one's own gaze positions relative to other's eyes in the amygdala (Gilardeau et al, 2021). Critically, we additionally found such…”

“…Major neural systems involved in social perception are distributed across the temporal and visual cortical areas (Haxby et al, 2000), including the hierarchically modular face patches in the inferior temporal cortex (Freiwald and Tsao, 2010;Koyano et al, 2021;Leopold et al, 2006;McMahon et al, 2015;Tsao et al, 2006), a prefrontal face patch in OFC (Barat et al, 2018;Rolls et al, 2006;Tsao et al, 2008), and the human fusiform gyrus (Kanwisher et al, 1997;McCarthy et al, 1997). Neurons in the primate amygdala have also been shown to signal facial expression categories and mutual eye gaze depicted in images (Gilardeau et al, 2021;Gothard et al, 2007;Livneh et al, 2012;Mosher et al, 2014;Rutishauser et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2017), both of which are intricately linked to interacting with others. How might the primate brain represent and enable social interaction?…”