Adaptation Of Laboratory Reared Monkeys To Field Environments

实验室饲养的猴子对野外环境的适应

• 批准号: 9150079
• 负责人: STEPHEN J. SUOMI
• 金额: $ 59.99万
• 依托单位: EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 至
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9150079
• 关键词: Adolescent; Adult; Alopecia; Assertiveness; Behavioral; Birth; Brain; Brain region; Calculi; Capuchin Monkey; Characteristics; Chronic; Cognitive; Collaborations; Data; Development; Dimensions; Electrodes; Electroencephalography; Emotional; Environment; Exhibits; Eye; Face; Facial Expression; Female; Frequencies; Genetic Predisposition to Disease; Gestures; Growth; Habitats; Hair; Height; Human; Human Milk; Hydrocortisone; Imitative Behavior; Incidence; Individual; Infant; Intervention; Juglans; Laboratories; Life; Link; Macaca mulatta; Measures; Memory; Milk; Monitor; Monkeys; Mothers; Neonatal; Neurotic Disorders; Newborn Infant; Nurseries; Nutrient; Nuts; Oral cavity; Oxytocin; Parietal; Pattern; Performance; Personal Satisfaction; Personality; Physiological; Physiological Processes; Population; Postpartum Period; Pregnancy; Process; Relative (related person); Reporting; Research; Role; Saline; Sampling; Scalp structure; Social Behavior; Social Dominance; Social Interaction; Social Perception; Stimulus; System; Technology; Testing; Time; Universities; Width; arm; base; cognitive function; cognitive performance; cognitive task; computer generated; experience; gaze; improved; indexing; infant temperament; life history; male; member; neonate; nonhuman primate; parity; peer; postnatal; preference; prenatal; programs; psychologic; response; salivary assay; social; therapy design; tool

Human mothers interact emotionally with their newborns through exaggerated facial expressions and mutual gaze, a capacity that has long been considered uniquely human. We previously initiated a research program on early face-to-face interactions in rhesus monkeys after we had serendipitously discovered that very young rhesus monkey infants did, in fact, engage in extensive face-to-face interactions with their mothers, but only during their first month of life. This past year we further characterized face-to-face interactions between mothers and their newborn infants in a naturalistic setting. We found large individual variability in rates of maternal/infant face-to-face interactions, in that mothers who had only one or two infants engaged in mutual gazing/lipsmacking in the first 30 days of life significantly more than mothers who had had three or more infants,whereas the more experienced mothers let their infants out of their arms reach significantly more in the first 30 days of life than newer mothers. Overall, mothers tended to engage in more face-to-face interactions with their male infants. We also discovered that during their first week some (but not all) infants could accurately match certain facial gestures produced by a human experimenter, even after a delay. For those infants who could imitate in this fashion, this capability was evident on their first postnatal day. We have since been investigating brain activity during periods of imitation using scalp electrodes to record EEG activity, and found a distinctive EEG signature involving significant suppression of mu rhythm activity at low frequencies in frontal and parietal brain regions exclusively during periods of imitation. We reported that this pattern of EEG activity intensified through that first week, and it was significantly stronger in mother-reared than in nursery-reared neonates. These findings demonstrate similarities between infant human and infant monkey EEG during periods of imitation. We also demonstrated, using eye-tracking technology, that week-old infants readily respond to a computer-generated dynamic monkey avatar, and that those infants who imitate tend to focus on different aspects of the aviatars face (eyes and mouth) than those don't (mouth only). We also compared neonatal imitation abilities in mother-reared and nursery-reared monkeys, focusing on D3 performance only. We reported that even though NR infants show an imitation effect when tested over the first week, they do not exhibit imitation specifically on D3. In contrast, MR monkeys responded to facial gestures with more gestures themselves, consistent with our previous EEG findings that MR infants show larger mu suppression than NR infants when viewing facial gestures. Given the potential impact of neonatal imitation on infants' social, cognitive, and emotional development, we devised one intervention whereby NR infants either received additional facial gesturing from a human caretaker, received additional handling (but did not see facial gestures), or remained in standard nursery rearing. We found that only the group that had received facial gesturing showed improved performance on the standard neonatal imitation task on D7 and showed greater sensitivity to facial identity of others in a standardized stranger task. Infants from the facial gesturing group also showed increased preference for a social video at D30 and again at D40, had better memory for social stimuli when tested at D60, and had higher levels of social contact with peers from D40 to D60,compared to infants in the handling and standard rearing groups. A second intervention designed to increase infants social perception and social sensitivity looked at the effects of oxytocin on infants social interactions. NR infants were nebulized with oxytocin or saline, and were then tested in an imitation recognition task. We reported inncreased time spent looking at faces following oxytocin, but not saline, treatment. Salivary assays confirmed increased levels of oxytocin, and infants also showed increased affiliative gesturing towards a human experimenter following oxytocin administration. We further explored infants' facial processing strategies by presenting them with various faces and facial configurations on a remote eye tracker. Rhesus macaque infants generally prefer faces with normally arranged features over faces with linearly arranged featured, suggesting a special sensitivity to faces and face-like stimuli. These preferences are particularly strong for faces of conspecifics, which suggests a genetic predisposition towards rhesus faces in particular. We also reported that particular sensitivities towards the eye region are exhibited by neonatal imitators but not by non-imitators, which may indicate that neonatal imitation and differential social sensitivity are intricately linked. A project begun last year has involved the analysis of mothers milk in rhesus monkeys with respect to parity and early life history (i.e., rearing condition). In collaboration with Dr. Katie Hinde at Harvard University, we collected milk samples from mothers over their infants' first 30 days of her infants life, and we analyzed these samples for cortisol content and nutrient composition. Similar to Dr. Hinde's studies of human mothers milk in older infants, we found that parity predicted milk yield volume (MYE) in the first month of life. Our findings also indicated that mothers with higher hair cortisol during pregnancy had a higher MYE in the first 30 days of life. Additionally, we found that cortisol levels in mothers' milk predicted infant cognitive functioning and social behavior later in life. Infants who ingested milk with higher cortisol content were less impulsive of a cognitive task but also initiated social behaviors with peers less frequently. Hair cortisol was used as a measure of chronic HPA activity in 3 additional studies completed this past year. First, hair cortisol levels shortly after birth, presumably reflecting prenatal HPA activity from mid-gestation onward, predicted cognitive performance capabilities and infant temperament in the first postnatal months. Second, changes in hair cortisol concentrations during the juvenile years predicted differences in social dominance status among adult female monkeys. A third project centered on the incidence of alopecia and related physiological processes. We had previously observed that many females undergo severe hair loss during pregnancy, only to regain full hair growth in the two months postpartum. In collaboration with Drs. Novak and Meyer we examined the role of chronic HPA axis activity as assessed by hair cortisol concentrations in alopecia. Our early results indicate that overall concentrations change across pregnancy and that monkeys that exhibit the greatest amount of hair loss have higher hair cortisol concentrations than those that do not. We continued our research program on personality and facial characteristics with our capuchin monkeys, focusing on 5 personality dimensions (Assertiveness, Openness, Neuroticism, Sociability, and Attentiveness, and reported that the monkeys facial width-to-height ratio as well as their face w), and found that the monkeys facial width-to-height ratio, as well as their face width/lower face height, are positively and significantly associated with Assertiveness. Lower face/face height ratio was also associated with neuroticism. This past year we also provided some of our capuchins with stone tools and observed for the first time in our colony spontaneous use of those tools to crack open walnuts. Nut-cracking has been observed in a few isolated wild populations of this species but is clearly far from universal. We plan to study its pattern of propagation in our captive colony, especially among juvenile and adolescent group members.

人类母亲通过夸张的面部表情和相互凝视与新生儿进行情感互动，这种能力长期以来被认为是人类独有的。我们之前启动了一项关于恒河猴早期面对面互动的研究项目，此前我们偶然发现，很小的恒河猴婴儿实际上确实与它们的母亲进行了广泛的面对面互动，但仅限于出生后的第一个月。去年，我们进一步描述了自然环境中母亲与其新生儿之间的面对面互动。我们发现，母亲/婴儿面对面互动的比例存在很大的个体差异，只有一个或两个婴儿的母亲在出生后的前 30 天内相互凝视/咂嘴的次数明显多于拥有三个或更多婴儿的母亲，而经验丰富的母亲在出生后的前 30 天内让婴儿离开自己怀抱的次数明显多于新手母亲。总体而言，母亲倾向于与男婴进行更多面对面的互动。 我们还发现，在出生的第一周，一些（但不是全部）婴儿即使在延迟之后也能准确地匹配人类实验者产生的某些面部表情。对于那些能够以这种方式模仿的婴儿来说，这种能力在出生后的第一天就很明显。此后，我们一直在研究模仿期间的大脑活动，使用头皮电极记录脑电图活动，并发现了一个独特的脑电图特征，涉及仅在模仿期间额叶和顶叶脑区域低频 mu 节律活动的显着抑制。我们报告说，这种脑电图活动模式在第一周就加强了，并且在母亲抚养的新生儿中明显强于在托儿所抚养的新生儿中。这些发现证明了婴儿人类和婴儿猴子脑电图在模仿期间的相似性。 我们还利用眼球追踪技术证明，一周大的婴儿很容易对计算机生成的动态猴子化身做出反应，并且那些模仿的婴儿往往会关注化身面部的不同方面（眼睛和嘴巴），而不是那些不模仿的婴儿（仅嘴巴）。我们还比较了母猴和保育猴的新生儿模仿能力，仅关注 D3 表现。我们报告说，尽管 NR 婴儿在第一周的测试中表现出模仿效果，但他们并没有在 D3 上表现出专门的模仿。相比之下，MR 猴子对面部表情的反应更多，这与我们之前的脑电图发现一致，即 MR 婴儿在观看面部表情时比 NR 婴儿表现出更大的 mu 抑制。 考虑到新生儿模仿对婴儿社交、认知和情感发展的潜在影响，我们设计了一种干预措施，让 NR 婴儿要么从人类看护者那里接受额外的面部手势，要么接受额外的处理（但没有看到面部手势），要么继续接受标准的托儿所抚养。我们发现，只有接受面部手势的组在 D7 的标准新生儿模仿任务中表现出更好的表现，并且在标准化的陌生人任务中对他人的面部身份表现出更高的敏感性。与处理组和标准饲养组的婴儿相比，面部手势组的婴儿在 D30 和 D40 时也表现出对社交视频的偏好增加，在 D60 测试时对社交刺激有更好的记忆，并且在 D40 至 D60 期间与同龄人有更高水平的社交接触。另一项旨在提高婴儿社会感知和社会敏感性的干预措施着眼于催产素对婴儿社交互动的影响。 NR 婴儿被雾化催产素或盐水，然后进行模仿识别任务测试。我们报告说，在使用催产素而非生理盐水治疗后，观察面部的时间增加了。唾液检测证实催产素水平增加，并且在施用催产素后，婴儿对人类实验者的亲和手势也有所增加。 我们通过在远程眼动仪上向婴儿展示各种面孔和面部配置，进一步探索了婴儿的面部处理策略。恒河猴婴儿通常更喜欢具有正常排列特征的面部，而不是具有线性排列特征的面部，这表明对面部和类似面部的刺激具有特殊的敏感性。这些偏好对于同种人的面孔尤其强烈，这表明尤其是对恒河猴面孔的遗传倾向。我们还报告说，新生儿模仿者对眼睛区域表现出特殊的敏感性，但非模仿者则不然，这可能表明新生儿的模仿和不同的社会敏感性之间存在着错综复杂的联系。 去年开始的一个项目涉及对恒河猴母乳的胎次和早期生活史（即饲养条件）进行分析。 我们与哈佛大学的凯蒂·辛德 (Katie Hinde) 博士合作，收集了婴儿出生后 30 天内母亲的乳汁样本，并分析了这些样本的皮质醇含量和营养成分。 与 Hinde 博士对较大婴儿母乳的研究类似，我们发现胎次可以预测出生后第一个月的产奶量 (MYE)。 我们的研究结果还表明，怀孕期间头发皮质醇水平较高的母亲在出生后的前 30 天其 MYE 也较高。 此外，我们发现母乳中的皮质醇水平可以预测婴儿以后的认知功能和社会行为。摄入皮质醇含量较高的牛奶的婴儿在认知任务中较少冲动，但与同龄人发起社交行为的频率也较低。 去年完成的另外 3 项研究中，头发皮质醇被用来衡量慢性 HPA 活性。首先，出生后不久的头发皮质醇水平可能反映了从妊娠中期开始的产前 HPA 活动，预测了产后头几个月的认知能力和婴儿气质。其次，幼年时期毛发皮质醇浓度的变化预示着成年雌性猴子的社会统治地位的差异。 第三个项目集中于脱发的发生率和相关的生理过程。 我们之前观察到，许多女性在怀孕期间经历了严重的脱发，但在产后两个月后头发才完全恢复生长。与博士合作。 Novak 和 Meyer 我们检查了慢性 HPA 轴活动的作用，通过脱发中头发皮质醇浓度进行评估。我们的早期结果表明，怀孕期间总体浓度发生变化，脱发最多的猴子比没有脱发的猴子的头发皮质醇浓度更高。 我们继续对卷尾猴进行性格和面部特征的研究项目，重点关注 5 个性格维度（自信、开放、神经质、社交性和注意力），并报告了猴子的面部宽高比以及面部 w），发现猴子的面部宽高比以及面部宽度/下面部高度与面部特征呈显着正相关。 自信。较低的面部/面部高度比也与神经质有关。去年，我们还为一些卷尾猴提供了石器，并首次在我们的栖息地观察到它们自发地使用这些工具来敲开核桃。在该物种的一些孤立的野生种群中观察到了坚果破裂的情况，但显然远非普遍。我们计划研究它在圈养群体中的传播模式，特别是在青少年群体成员中。