Conspecifics

Humans, dolphins, and elephants are the only known species that vocally label their conspecifics. It remains unclear whether nonhuman primates share this ability. By recording hundreds of spontaneous “phee-call” dialogues between pairs of marmoset monkeys we discovered that marmosets use these calls to vocally label their conspecifics. Moreover, by using closed-loop playback experiments we found that they respond more consistently and correctly to calls that are specifically directed at them. Analysis of calls from multiple monkeys revealed that family members use similar calls and acoustic fe

…in the same brain area between conspecifics. We expect neural responses to be functionally highly similar within a species (since we expect findings to generalize across animals). What kind of transform will make such similarity most evident? That is, under what kind of transform are conspecifics’ neural responses highly similar to each other? Researchers often default to linear regression as a reasonable transform class for measuring neural

Highly-social animals, like humans, live with many individuals, and interact with each other at times, locations and manner of their choosing. However, neurophysiological investigations of social responses are rarely conducted in such rich settings. To determine how the brain represents social information in a naturalistic setting – when the animals’ behavior is not experimentally constrained to a particular task – we constructed a bat cave for a colony of 5–10 bats of both sexes. The bats lived there 24×7, free to engage in any behaviors. Every day we conducted a ~3 hour experimental session,

…of, and behavioral responses to, conspecifics. The appeal here is that Oxytocin has likely conserved roles across all vertebrates, including humans, and that the larval zebrafish allows us to study some of the general principles across the brain but nonetheless at cellular resolution. This allows us to propose mechanistic models of emotional states.