The Impact of Oxytocin on the Neural Representation of Social Information

催产素对社会信息神经表征的影响

• 批准号: 8883718
• 负责人: Elizabeth A Buffalo
• 金额: $ 27.49万
• 依托单位: EMORY UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2016-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8883718
• 关键词: Amygdaloid structure; Animals; Area; Attention; Autistic Disorder; Behavior; Behavioral; Bilateral; Brain; Brain region; Complex; Data; Decision Making; Development; Discrimination; Emotional; Emotions; Eye; Face; Face Processing; Facial Expression; Frequencies; Galvanic Skin Response; Goals; Human; Impairment; Individual; Individuation; Instruction; Learning; Lesion; Life; Measures; Mental disorders; Microinjections; Monkeys; Neurons; Organism; Outcome; Oxytocin; Oxytocin Receptor; Play; Positioning Attribute; Primates; Process; Rewards; Rodent; Role; Signal Transduction; Social Behavior; Social Discrimination; Social Interaction; Societies; Stimulus; Testing; Therapeutic; Time; affiliative behavior; base; cognitive process; directed attention; effective therapy; gaze; heart rate variability; improved; member; memory recognition; neurophysiology; nonhuman primate; relating to nervous system; research study; response; sample fixation; social; social cognition

PROJECT SUMMARY (See instructions): Oxytocin promotes affiliative behaviors and enhances the ability of animals to discriminate between individuals of their own species. The amygdala plays a central role in establishing the social and emotional significance of social stimuli including faces and facial expressions. The central hypothesis of this project is that the oxytocin-induced changes at the behavioral level result from cellular changes in the amygdala, which contains a large concentration of oxytocin receptors. We propose that oxytocin facilitates prosocial behavior by (1) increasing attention directed to social stimuli, particularly the eyes of conspecifics and enhancing the activity of anygdala neurons in response to fixations to the eyes and by (2) enhancing the discrimination of social stimuli through enhanced neural selectivity in the amygdala for face identity and facial expressions. These hypotheses will be tested by recording the activity of multiple single neurons along with the local field potential in the amygdala of monkeys exposed to videos that simulate socio-emotional interactions with other monkeys. It is expected that oxytocin, administered intranasally or by microinjection into the ventricles, will induce behavioral and neural changes that reflect enhanced attention to the eyes and faces, higher individuation of faces, and a processing bias for affiliative stimuli. By examining the effects of oxytocin on neural activity in the amygdala, the proposed experiments will provide a comprehensive test of the hypothesis that oxytocin enhances social cognition via a direct effect on single neurons and networks of neurons in the amygdala. Further, the proposed experiments have the exciting potential outcome of enabling a more detailed and mechanistic understanding of higher cognitive processes involved in primate social behavior, which is critical for the development of better treatments for humans with impairments in social cognition.

项目总结（见说明）： 催产素促进亲和行为，增强动物区分自己物种个体的能力。杏仁核在确定包括面孔和面部表情在内的社会刺激的社会和情感意义方面起着核心作用。该项目的中心假设是催产素诱导的行为水平的变化是杏仁核细胞变化的结果， 含有大量催产素受体我们认为，催产素通过以下方式促进亲社会行为：（1）增加对社会刺激的注意力，特别是同种人的眼睛，并增强杏仁核神经元对眼睛注视的反应;（2）通过增强杏仁核对面孔身份和面部表情的神经选择性，增强对社会刺激的辨别力。 这些假设将通过记录多个单神经元的活动沿着局部场电位在暴露于模拟与其他猴子的社会情感互动的视频的猴子的杏仁核中进行测试。预期鼻内或通过微注射到脑室中施用的催产素将诱导行为和神经变化，其反映对眼睛和面部的增强的注意力，更高的注意力。 个体化的面孔，和亲和刺激的处理偏见。通过研究催产素对杏仁核神经活动的影响，所提出的实验将提供一个全面的假设，即催产素通过对杏仁核中的单个神经元和神经元网络的直接影响来增强社会认知。此外，所提出的实验具有令人兴奋的潜在结果，能够更详细和机械地理解灵长类动物中涉及的高级认知过程。 社会行为，这对于开发更好的治疗方法来治疗社会认知障碍的人至关重要。