Social Psychology Commons^™

Behavioral Context Affects Social Signal Representations Within Single Primate Prefrontal Cortex Neurons, Vladimir Jovanovic, Adam R. Fishbein, Lisa A. De La Mothe, Kuo-Fen Lee, Cory T. Miller

Psychology Faculty Research

We tested whether social signal processing in more traditional, head-restrained contexts is representative of the putative natural analog – social communication – by comparing responses to vocalizations within individual neurons in marmoset prefrontal cortex (PFC) across a series of behavioral contexts ranging from traditional to naturalistic. Although vocalization responsive neurons were evident in all contexts, cross-context consistency was notably limited. A response to these social signals when subjects were head-restrained was not predictive of a comparable neural response to the identical vocalizations during natural communication, even within the same neuron. Neural activity at the population level followed a similar pattern, …