The Impact of Oxytocin on the Neural Representation of Social Information

项目总结(见说明)： 催产素促进从属行为，并增强动物区分自己物种个体的能力。杏仁核在确定包括脸部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。这个项目的中心假设是催产素引起的行为水平的变化是由于杏仁核细胞的变化，这是 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)增加对社会刺激的关注，特别是同种特异性的眼睛，并增强对注视眼睛的任何神经元的活动；(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能力。 这些假说将通过记录多个单个神经元的活动以及暴露在模拟与其他猴子的社会情感互动的视频中的猴子杏仁核的局部场电位来验证。预计，通过鼻腔或脑室微量注射催产素，会引起行为和神经变化，反映出人们对眼睛和脸部的注意力增强。 面孔的个性化，以及对附属刺激的加工偏向。通过研究催产素对杏仁核神经活动的影响，拟议的实验将全面检验催产素通过直接作用于杏仁核中的单个神经元和神经元网络来增强社会认知的假设。此外，拟议的实验具有令人兴奋的潜在结果，使人们能够更详细和更机械地理解灵长类动物中涉及的高级认知过程。 社会行为，这对于为社会认知障碍的人类开发更好的治疗方法至关重要。

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.