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Authors & Affiliations
Nate Dolensek, Doris Tsao, Shi Chen
Abstract
Primates possess sophisticated social cognitive abilities, interpreting complex social cues and producing adaptive behaviors in real-time. These abilities are thought to rely on distributed circuits spanning sensory, limbic, and prefrontal brain regions. Despite some progress in identifying neural correlates of specific social features, such as gaze and social rank, a comprehensive computational framework linking social perception to behavior remains elusive; at least in part due to the high dimensionality of both the input space (complex social scenes) and the output space (diverse behavioral responses).
To address this, we combine artificial neural networks (ANNs) and high-density Neuropixels electrophysiological recordings to uncover how the primate brain transforms dynamic social scene perception into social behavior. We first employ whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to locate brain regions selective for social video in macaques, specifically identifying the dorsal bank of the superior temporal sulcus (dSTS), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and anterior insula (aIC). We then target these regions using Neuropixels probes, revealing strong selectivity for social stimuli on a single-unit level. By training a set of neural networks to embed and reconstruct videos from neural activity, we surprisingly observe that neural responses in OFC and aIC support astonishingly accurate reconstructions of social videos. We further extend this approach to generate optimal stimuli for neurons from each region and identify interpretable axes of neural responses like social partner angle and distance. Finally, we identify a subset of neurons predicting social behavioral responses and observe a causal role of activity in aIC and OFC in social behavior production, with electrical microstimulation evoking gaze shifts and facial movements.
These results suggest that these frontal brain regions contain a surprisingly rich code for social scenes and play a critical role in transforming social perception into behavior, positioning them as central nodes in social cognition.