Large-scale recording of population activity during social cognition in freely moving non-human primates

项目总结/摘要 社会互动是我们日常生活中无处不在的一个方面，对物种的健康和生存至关重要， 但对它们背后的神经计算知之甚少。阻碍我们理解的主要限制 社会认知的神经基础是缺乏一个合适的框架，使我们能够研究它是如何 在真实的时间里从大脑网络之间的相互作用中出现。事实上，研究复杂的神经基础 传统上，社会互动是通过在实验室中研究非人类灵长类动物的大脑来进行的。 在计算机上呈现合成刺激时，头部和身体受到约束的环境 监视器.然而，人们越来越认识到，在空间受限的人工环境中研究大脑， 实验室设备严重限制了我们理解大脑回路功能的能力。克服 这些限制，我们提出了一种新的方法来理解社会认知的神经基础。我们 将使用一个高收益的无线系统来研究社会互动的皮层动力学和可塑性， 记录非人类灵长类动物在多个视觉、颞叶和前额叶皮层区域的群体活动， 与环境和其他动物自由互动。这种新方法将使我们能够发现 神经网络活动的动态，推动行为学相关行为中的社会互动 涉及感觉统合、记忆和复杂决策的任务。我们的综合项目带来了 结合创新的大脑记录技术和微电子技术以及大型数据集分析 技术.我们提出的研究将通过将社会神经科学从简单的 观察动物的行为和记录单细胞的反应-以定量的了解， 在自由活动的非人灵长类动物的社会行为中进行分布式神经网络编码 丰富的自然任务。我们预计，使用我们的方法记录的大量神经数据将是 极大的兴趣，临床医生和计算神经科学家研究的一般性质的正常和 功能失调的神经网络，可能导致对自闭症和注意力机制的医学见解 影响社会交往的缺陷性疾病。

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Social interactions, a ubiquitous aspect of our everyday life, are critical to the health and survival of the species, but little is known about their underlying neural computations. The major limitation preventing our understanding of the neural underpinnings of social cognition is the lack of a suitable framework to allow us to study how it emerges in real time from interactions among brain networks. Indeed, examining the neural bases of complex social interactions has been traditionally performed by studying the brain of nonhuman primates in a laboratory environment in which the head and body are restrained while synthetic stimuli are presented on a computer monitor. However, it has become increasingly understood that studying the brain in spatially confined, artificial laboratory rigs poses severe limits on our capacity to understand the function of brain circuits. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach to understand the neural underpinnings of social cognition. We will use a high-yield wireless system to study the cortical dynamics and plasticity of social interactions by recording population activity in multiple visual, temporal, and prefrontal cortical areas while nonhuman primates are interacting freely with their environment and with other animals. This new approach will enable us to uncover the dynamics of neuronal network activity that drives social interactions in an ethologically relevant behavioral task that involves sensory integration, memory, and complex decision-making. Our integrative project brings together innovative brain recording technologies and microelectronics together with large data sets analysis techniques. Our proposed research will constitute a paradigm shift by moving social neuroscience – from simply observing animal behavior and recording the responses of single cells – to a quantitative understanding of the distributed neuronal network encoding during social behavior in freely moving nonhuman primates performing rich naturalistic tasks. We anticipate that the large quantity of neural data recorded using our approach will be of great interest to clinicians and computational neuroscientists studying general properties of normal and dysfunctional neural networks, possibly leading to medical insights into the mechanisms of autism and attention deficit disorders that impair social interactions.